We have been able to define multiple cameras of the same model in previous revisions, however we are having issues with doing this under release 2024.3.1 (I believe this is running ubuntu server 22 LTS on a x64 processor. The cameras are the recommended 9281 USB cameras.
The process goes like this.
Boot coproc. No cameras are connected.
Connect camera.
Photonvision sees the new camera
Define pipeline for april tag, Name pipeline. Also name the camera – Cam0_April.
Restart device.
Calibrate camera
Set 3d mode.
Restart device and test. Camera works well. See screen shot.
Two new cameras appear. However these actually show the image from the same camera. See picture.
Restart device (to see if the duplicate disappears.) Now the original camera doesn’t show up. The two new cameras show up and are still the same device.
I looked for documentation on deleting all the camera configuration to start from scratch but didn’t find anything. Disconnected all cameras. I looking around I deleted the camera_backups folder contents and the sqlite database file. Rebooted coproc. Repeated the steps. Same results.
I don’t have any experience with Photonvision myself, but I remember reading on here that to use multiple cameras they must be different models or have different names. My understating is that Arducams are preferred since they provide a utility to change the name of the camera.
Thank you for the reply. It was to our understanding that limitation had been fixed and we have been able to use the same model in earlier versions, and we are using Arducams.
Make shure you are using the Arducam serial number tool to make shure each camera you are using has a unique serial number and device name, if not, use the tool to edit them.
Not sure when/if this may not have been the case in the past or when/if it may not be the case in the future, but it is the case now.
Since you have Arducams, just set each to a unique name using the tool that can be found by digging through the link in the above post (or the same link in the PV docs I’ve linked) and you’ll be good.
The only different things I did were rename the camera names with the Arducam tool before setting up and calibrating, and also plugging them both in at the same time to calibrate.
We suspected the issue was in our buck-boosts because we would also crash whenever we saved the second calibration. So we switched those out for some super nice ones from Pololu and haven’t had a chance to check if our issue was really solved. We made the assumption that the cheap amazon ones couldn’t handle the current pull from the pi’s as they start to ramp up.
The PV Docs have been kind of lacking in some areas and I’ve mentioned this to them too because some of these things aren’t really specified in the docs. If you need more help, I recommend joining the Discord server because they do help there. Personally, I wish there was a more significant support team than the same 2-3 members, but it’s nothing we can control since it is an open-source community-run organization.
If anyone solves this issue let me know too, we may still have these same issues once we have ours rewired again.
