Accomplished Tasks
This week, I was finally able to get the camera up and running with a stable and high definition video stream on the RaspberryPi desktop. It involved a lot of firmware updates as well as trying out different pieces of hardware such as the ribbon cable used to send camera data to the RPi. I also managed to deal with the stale external trigger issue that would cause the stream to become stale by increasing the timeout of the camera within the config file. Finally, I asked another team to borrow their PTZ camera since they ordered the same one from inventory as us. I realized the camera itself was the issue and ultimately decided to request a new one from inventory albeit without the Pan Tilt Zoom feature. I hope to attach the camera module to the top of the old PTZ Camera in order to continue using the panning and tilting feature without needing to order another PTZ camera and use our budget.
Progress
Currently, I am working on using OpenCV to get the CSI camera to open and begin streaming on my own personal computer. This way, I can create a central hub of communication for the video stream to be extracted and used in our monitoring web application and also to perform real time object detection on. This has proven to be somewhat difficult as the library our camera uses doesn’t currently work with openCV, so I may need to try another method of streaming the camera footage from my computer or else I may have to stream the video from the RPi and send it to my computer. Either way, I will work on reducing latency between our independent elements.
Next Week’s Deliverables
Next week, I will work on the video communication between Ronit’s object detection server and my web application since the video will be used in both of our subsystems. Then, I will work on adding more features to my web application which was previously delayed to the new camera issue caused by our conversion from drone to rover.