SmartDashboard MJPG stream cutting out

[Ben Wolsieffer]

Today in competition, we were running into an issue where our MJPG camera stream on the SmartDashboard dies every 15-20 seconds. It usually comes back after 15-30 seconds. The video is being streamed from an NVidia Jetson TK1, using a custom server. I would immediately assume that this problem is caused by this software, but I'm not so sure because it only occurs on the field network. On the SmartDashboard we get a "read timeout" error when the stream dies.

Throughout all of our testing during build season and tethered testing at competition, this has not been a problem. As far as I can remember, we never saw this problem occur during Suffield Shakedown, though we didn't use our vision system much there. It has only occurred on the field at this event

I have talked to a few of the field staff at the event and went through the DS logs to check for problems, but there wasn't much interesting there. Bandwidth usage is within acceptable limits (~3 Mbps) and there is not a lot of packet loss.

I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions to help get this working better for tomorrow, because I am at a loss to figure out what is going on. My long term solution is likely going to involve going to a UDP based streaming protocol.

Thanks.

[Arhowk]

Your field staff are probably the best bet for helping out (atleast in Michigan where most of the FTAs are quite good at everything outside of the driver station as well, I've never been outside of here so I wouldn't know otherwise ). A read timeout would signify that you lost connection to the bb. Did you confirm all of the wiring to and near the bb is totally solid? No shorts or anything, good fuse on the power connector if you're using a fuse connection and not vrm, and so on and so forth.

If this doesn't work, what id try to do is add some way to have the bb transmit a sine wave over as well so you can verify proper operation of the bb and that it is indeed a camera or BB issue,

Edit: sorry I meant tk1 not bb (beagle bone)