Hey CD,
Upon several of your guys’ recommendations, we bought a few Playstation Eye cameras, and while they are great cameras, we’ve had a hard time getting them to do anything besides look pretty on the robot. We are using the boilerplate code in robotInit().
CameraServer.getInstance().startAutomaticCapture();
Can anyone who has used this camera help us figure this out? It won’t display as a CameraServer stream on the SmartDashboard.
I haven’t used the PS Eye before, so let me offer some general troubleshooting tips for USB cameras:
Are you getting an error message at all, or just not getting a stream? Is there some indication that the camera is on, such as an LED? If so, does that turn on? Does the camera show up as a device in the roboRIO webdashboard? If so, are you using the right name for it (e.g. cam0 vs cam1…) in your startAutomaticCapture call?
From the research I’ve done (2 google searches) it looks like the driver is standard enough to come precompiled with the Linux kernel and that other distros see it just fine as a standard USB camera.
I assume you’ve tested it on a non-roboRIO platform, so the camera itself is not the issue.
Not seeing the stream on the driver station camera server viewer, I’ve tried putting in 0 and 1 in startAutomaticCapture(). LED on the light turns on, I have it in the top roborio port (the one close to the edge).
We have tested and changed settings on the laptop.
The roborio kernel doesn’t have the PS Eye driver.
Is there any way to install it?
Most modern linux distros support the PS Eye out of the box flawlessly. If you were to use a coproccessor like a raspberry pi 3, you could use it like any other webcam. I have never tried messing around with the roboRio’s os, but it may be possible to patch the kernel with the driver for the ov_534 driver which is what is needed for the PS Eye. If I had a roborio in front of me, I would give it a try, but I don’t. These instructions may or may not work: http://wiki.nuigroup.com/PS3_Eye_on_Linux
Usual disclaimer: you may break your roborio os installation and may need to reflash it, blah blah, etc
When I looked into the PS Eye, I found several threads recommending it, but none specifically mentioning the roboRIO. My impression is that the few people using it are using it on coprocessors, and no one’s actually tried to compile a driver for the roboRIO.
We used the PS3 eye on nVidia Jetson last year. We had to install the “grinch kernel” in order to get drivers for it. Brandon got it working out of the box on a Raspberry Pi too. I haven’t heard of anyone using it on the robo-rio.