Accomplished Tasks
This week, I was working on the ArduCam and PTZ gimbal and trying to get it to display a camera stream on the RaspberryPi Desktop. Due to issues with the old RPi4 OS installation, I wiped the SD card and did a clean installation of the Bullseye OS on the SD card and installed the OpenCV and Libcamera libraries. Thankfully, now the PTZ gimbal interface showed up and I am able to use keypresses to move and tilt the camera around.
Progress
Although the camera is able to pan 180 degrees and tilt, the camera stream is not showing up and only a black preview window is showing. I’ve been dealing with possibly a firmware error that prevents the camera from showing due to the deprecated libcamera -apps library that has now become rpicam-apps. Even if I wanted to download the rpicam-apps library, it is not compatible with and RPi4 and would need me to order an RPi5. On the other hand, it could be a hardware issue due to a damaged ribbon cable which I will request a new one from Quinn and reattach it. I’ve been struggling a lot with staying on track due to all these unforeseen problems with the camera and the lack of documentation and tech support online. If this camera doesn’t work, I may potentially request a different one or buy a new one altogether that doesn’t require RaspberryPi.
Next Week’s Deliverables
Next week, I plan on getting a video stream whether it comes from the ArduCam or a new camera altogether to integrate with Ronit’s object detection software. In addition, I will make sure that it’s integrated within my web application for monitoring.