Accomplished Tasks
This week, I received the Arducam with PTZ Gimbal from inventory along with a Raspberry Pi 4 in order to control it. I was able to attach the Arducam to the PTZ Gimbal using an acrylic sheet and screws in order to have 180 degree panning. In addition, I used wires to connect the Arducam and gimbal to the RPI and set up the RPi as well. David helped me with the setup process on the RPi as it was our first time using one and we were missing extra tools such as a monitor, keyboard, and wired mouse. To test the camera on the RPi desktop, I found some sample code online and the corresponding libcamera packages used for the Arducam.
Progress
I spent a majority of my time setting up the Raspberry Pi as there were issues connecting it to CMU-DEVICE. In addition, since the RPi wasn’t the latest model or updated to the latest OS, we were unable to download essential packages and dependencies. In order to fix this, I had to manually convert the OS version from Buster to Bullseye since the picamera2 library is not supported. There was many issues regarding installations (couldn’t use pip3 to install since it was deprecated, deprecated config file name in RPi sources list, lack of swap to install dependencies, and deprecated commands in general from the outdated set up guide of this camera). Because of these issues, I faced a lot of errors just running the code. After finally getting a preview window when running ‘libcamera-hello’ to show the camera’s perspective, it stopped working after updating the OS. However, the code now runs without import errors, so I believe it’s fixable after rebuilding and compiling the libcamera library from source.
Next Week’s Deliverables
Next week, I plan on getting a working stream of the camera visible from the RPI desktop and have it attached to the camera mount that will be on top of the rover and continue refining the code that will move the PTZ gimbal. In addition, I will help with the laser modules feature that will be connected to the camera in order to have our spotlight implemented.