elixir-vision / picam Goto Github PK

MMAL supports annotating videos with arbitrary overlaid text. It would be really nice if we could set this from Elixir.

I've installed a fresh version of Raspbian as well as Elixir and Nerves. I also downloaded this file and moved it into /home/pi. When I SSH into the file picam/lib/picam, I open up iex and type c("camera.ex"). Once I do this, it says
[Picam.Camera]
which I assume is correct. However when I go to run Picam.Camera.start_link() I get the following error.

Any help is much appreciated.

The port crashes when you try to set the image size to 250x250.

As I was working on my training materials for LoneStar, I really wanted to have a way that I could ask the camera what its current configuration is, so I started my own GenServer to keep track of the config commands it's sending to Picam, but this is the wrong way to go because it'll get inconsistent with crashes, has to know too much about the Picam API, etc.

I think the Picam.Camera is the right place to store the current state, since it's already handling all the messages coming through, and it's already a GenServer.

This library works great when using very low quality settings but as soon as as I set jpeg quality over like 30 or 40 I get timeouts. This is for still images. Also full hd 1920x1080 stills don't work with quality of 20. Is this why the default quality is set to 15?

I'm using a pi zero, so maybe it is just not powerful enough? I'm using nerves. I'll try installing raspbian and use the command line tools (https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/raspbian/applications/camera.md), see if they yield the same disappointed results.

Seems like a cool package!

Ideally, we wouldn't have to duplicate so much code between the fake version and the real version. It would also be great to optimize the fake images that are included to shave off as much file size as possible (even though they're already not huge).

I leaving this here as reported from ElixirConfEU that the new version of the cam doesn’t function properly. https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/camera-module-v2/

I haven’t verified this, needs research

See raspberrypi/userland@eb006e5.

It's unclear whether this is a gain for us, but the call is so trivially simple that it seems worth a try.

I opened an issue about this on the nerves_system_rpi4 repo, but am now wondering if the issue is within Picam, and not the PI4 build root.

nerves-project/nerves_system_rpi4#45

When using PiCam on a PI 4, I get the following error. The same application software works fine on a PI 3.

iex(10)> File.write!(Path.join(System.tmp_dir!, "frame.jpg"), Picam.next_frame)
** (exit) exited in: GenServer.call(Picam.FakeCamera, :next_frame, 5000)
    ** (EXIT) no process: the process is not alive or there's no process currently associated with the given name, possibly because its application isn't started
    (elixir 1.10.4) lib/gen_server.ex:1013: GenServer.call/3

I intentionally don't have a FakeCamera enabled. If I enable one, I get fake output.

But, if I stop the nerves software, I am able to run raspistill and save a JPG on the PI 4:

iex> Application.stop(:camera)
iex> Application.stop(:picam) 
iex> System.cmd("/usr/bin/raspistill", ["-v", "-o", "/tmp/image.jpg"], stderr_to_stdout: true)

Any ideas on why Picam errors on the PI 4? What would be useful to help debug / isolate / resolve the issue?

It would be great to be able to configure multiple outputs with different resolution and color space.

For example in my https://github.com/GregMefford/omni_eye training project, we use the Picam video to both stream a video to a display and to use zbar to scan for barcodes in the image. Ideally, we would send high-resolution color video to the screen and low-resolution luma-only images to the barcode-scanner, so that it has to do less processing work.

Another example would be to have a lower resolution for video preview being displayed on a small screen and a higher resolution for video being streamed or captured to a file. Similarly, it might be useful to have the preview as an RGB bitmap and the full video encoded as H.264 or MJPEG.

I already have an USB webcam lying around, and would rather not buy an extra hardware component if not really necessary, so therefore:

Is it possible to use a USB webcam instead of the Raspberry Pi Camera module? (Or if not, how difficult would it for me to fork the project and add this, possibly creating a Pull Request if desired?)

I'm trying to build firmware with Nerves and Picam, but so far I haven't been able to, due to an error that I cannot quite understand.

I'm trying to build formware for a "Raspberry Pi Zero W", which should be supported, at least that's what's the README.md seems to say.

Updating base firmware image with Erlang release...
scrub-otp-release.sh: ERROR: Unexpected executable format for '/home/jesterprince/Projects/elixir/nervesy/camera/_build/_nerves-tmp/rootfs-additions/srv/erlang/lib/picam-0.4.0/priv/raspijpgs'

Got:
 readelf:ARM;0x5000400, Version5 EABI, hard-float ABI

Expecting:
 readelf:ARM;0x5000200, Version5 EABI, soft-float ABI

This file was compiled for the host or a different target and probably
will not work.

Check the following:

1. Are you using a path dependency in your mix deps? If so, run
   'mix clean' in that directory to avoid pulling in any of its
   build products.

2. Did you recently upgrade to Nerves 1.3 or Distillery 2.0? Make
   sure that your 'rel/config.exs' has 'plugin Nerves'. See
   https://hexdocs.pm/nerves/updating-projects.html#updating-from-v1-0-to-v1-3-0

3. Did you recently upgrade or change your Nerves system? If so,
   try cleaning and rebuilding this project and its deps.

4. Are you building outside of Nerves' mix integration? If so,
   make sure that you've sourced 'nerves-env.sh'.

If you're still having trouble, please file an issue on Github
at https://github.com/nerves-project/nerves_system_br/issues.

** (Mix) Nerves encountered an error. %IO.Stream{device: :standard_io, line_or_bytes: :line, raw: true}

It's definitely an error related to Picam, because the firmware builds when I don't use Picam. The source is literally just a default Nerves project with {:picam, "~> 0.4.0"} added to the mix.exs.

I also checked the 4 suggestions, and I'm sure none of them are the reason for the problem.

Is this a bug, am I doing something blatantly wrong or am I just being an idiot? Any Help would be appreciated.

A side effect of encoding video is calculating motion vectors in hardware. It would be nice to get the motion vectors in Elixir to support things like simple motion detection and optical flow calculations. It wouldn't be as good as what can be done with OpenCV, but it's computationally cheap and would provide for some fun experiments.

50 Hz and 60 Hz flicker filtering is now available. See raspberrypi/userland@771a9aa for the options and #defines for adding.

Hi,

I just tried to use picam on my Raspberry Pi 3 running Nerves but I only get this error:

iex([email protected])1> Picam.Camera.start_link
{:ok, #PID<0.440.0>}
iex([email protected])2>
20:10:04.387 [warn] Camera GenServer exiting: :unexpected_exit

22:10:24.982 [error] GenServer Picam.Camera terminating
** (stop) :unexpected_exit
Last message: {#Port<6189.2630>, {:exit_status, 1}}
State: %{port: #Port<6189.2630>, requests: []}
** (EXIT from #PID<0.437.0>) :unexpected_exit

Am I doing something wrong?

There was a question on the Nerves Slack channel about whether it was possible to preview the video on the HDMI output, and I've also wanted to do this in the past but haven't gotten around to working on support for it yet. Just creating an issue here in case someone gets a chance to work on it.

Hello

I opend this issue accidentally, sorry!

Thank you for your great work!

Hi,

Thank you for such a great package.

I wonder if that's possible to add support for PI4 and their new HQ camera?

Thank you,
Pavel.

I am trying to take photos at full resolution of my camera using a Raspberry Pi 3.
Setting the size of the image to anything above 1024x768 and a high quality (80) using:

Picam.set_size(1024, 768)
Picam.set_quality(80)

results in a timeout:

** (exit) exited in: GenServer.call(Picam.Camera, :next_frame, 5000)
    ** (EXIT) time out
    (elixir) lib/gen_server.ex:774: GenServer.call/3

I've tried explicitly changing the timeout calling GenServer.call(Picam.Camera, :next_frame, 10000) directly (rather than Picam.next_frame) but changing the timeout never results in a successful image.

Is there a way around this? or something that I'm perhaps doing wrong here?