Camera Stream Continually Restarting

Blue Robotics Software Companion (Retired)
3

Hi @prider, welcome to the forum :slight_smile:

Thanks for the detailed breakdown of your existing setup and what you’ve tried so far - that’s really helpful!

In the screenshot you provided of the video screen session, it seems like your camera is restarting itself after about a second of streaming (it happens once at the top, and then again near the middle, from which I assume it’s likely a repeated occurrence).

The stream itself isn’t related to QGC or the topside, which means the issue is most likely with either

  • your Companion computer,
  • the camera itself, or
  • the cable between them

You’ve mentioned that the camera works well with the same Raspberry Pi and power supply, which effectively narrows down the issue to some kind of incompatibility between the Companion video streaming functionality and what the camera is happy to output. A few more things that would be helpful to try/for us to know:

  1. Does the streaming still cut out in the same way if you reduce the framerate and/or frame size on the Camera page of the web interface?
  2. Are you running other code on the Raspberry Pi, or just the standard companion image?
  3. Does the streaming fix itself if you quit the other companion screen sessions?
    The following code (which you can type or paste into the web-terminal) quits all sessions except the webui, webterminal, and video. They restore themselves when you reboot.
    for SESSION in $(screen -ls | grep "(" | cut -f2 | grep -v -e web -e video)
do
    screen -S $SESSION -X quit
done
  4. Are you able to try with a shorter cable (to the camera) and/or stronger (higher current rating) power supply? It’s possible the Raspberry Pi is struggling to provide enough power to the camera when it’s also dealing with the loads from companion

Generally it’s not an issue to put a lot of detail/content into a single post, particularly because responses can directly quote from parts of it. If the post is getting a bit unwieldy it can be helpful to break it up with some headings, which you can learn more about in the How to Use the Blue Robotics Forums post :slight_smile: