Video overlay for bluerov standard package

Hi all
I have fitted a minim osd from hobbyking to the bluerov2 standard package and managed to get a nice looking overlay that also comes up with leak alarm and low battery warnings. I have a need for time and date to be displayed as well. If anyone could help out with this id be very grateful.

I have attached a picture of the overlay

Cheers

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Not sure what help you need, are you asking how to get the date / time from the computer? Under Windows .NET provides this: DateTime.Now Property (System) | Microsoft Docs

Unfortunately, there is no support in minimosd to display the time and date. Further, the Autopilot software that provides the minimosd with the relevant data for the overlay is not aware of the time and date unless there is a GPS fix.

-Jacob

nightghost’s minimosd-extra repository has support for date and time. You might have to update your firmware to have that functionality, depending on where you got your minimosd.

The limitation of a GPS fix still applies. You could possibly connect the minimosd to your computer and circumvent this, if you want to hack some code.

-Jacob

@SoSub Hadn’t thought about using an OSD with the standard electronics, but I love the idea. Is this the one you got?

Did you have to fabricate any special cables to hook it up?

Hi paul yeah that is the one.
Here is a picture of it setup on the bench when i was trying it out.
The only cable i had to make up was from the telemetry 2 port on the pixhawk to the osd.
Everything else is pretty straight forward.

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Thanks jacob i have a spare gps that ill try out and see if i can get the time displayed. Would the time and date remain on the osd display even once the fix is lost until power is cycled?

I’m going to have to try this! :smile:

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@SoSub Yes, the Pixhawk should continue reporting the correct time if it looses a fix.
I have come up with a way to tell the Pixhawk the correct time using the surface computer, this is something I have wanted for a while in order to get correct timestamps on the dataflash logs. I still need to play with it a little bit though.

-Jacob

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Thats excellent. I look forward to hearing how you go with it.

Since the OSD mostly replaces the QGround Control user interface, would it be possible to run a “reduced window” version of QGC?

I’m not sure what you’re thinking, can you elaborate?

@jwalser - Kind of weird question, but I’ll try to explain. Would it be possible to modify QGC so that, instead of a map we could have that area -transparent-? That way I could run another app, such as my sonar, at the same time on the same display as QGC. Or perhaps launch an app in a window in QGC? That way QGC would be a “shell” to my other app?

This would be difficult. I think that making the main window transparent would be possible, but I don’t know about launching another app in QGC.

@paul-unterweiser - QGC doesn’t lend itself well to being minimized, but there’s really only a few messages that get sent to the ROV during operation, like the joystick control message. A separate program could be written to read the joystick and send the appropriate messages (using available mavlink utilities like pymavlink).

That program could be very minimal and run on a laptop or Raspberry Pi or similar.

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Thanks @rjehangir! :slight_smile:

hi
it can we work with usb camera also ?
in video recording through qgc it record all osd value in video?.

thanks

Hello, Rohit,

This kind of OSDs works by manipulating the analog video, so the short answer is no, you can’t use these with QGC.

You could use something like an easycap USB analog video capture device, encode that on the Raspberry, and send to QGC, but that will cost in latency, image quality, and CPU usage on the Raspberry for encoding. So while it could be done, it will likely be not usable, and not worth the trouble.

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Hi @SoSub did your overlay report depth? Do you know what firmware is on the board? Cheers

Hi Marcus, yeah the overlay reported Depth but it displayed as - alt as we just used drone firmware minimosd-extra.

follow the link on @jwalser post here Video overlay for bluerov standard package - #4 by jwalser

also we ended up using a micro minimosd board as it proved to be much more reliable. we ran the for a couple of years without any problems. here is a link.
Original Airbot MicroOSD V2.4 Upgrade OSD Module with AB7456 Chip & LDO Protecti Sale - Banggood USA sold out-arrival notice-arrival notice