I have some trouble with my usb camera. It currently works fine for 2-5 minutes after which it turns to a gray screen. I have kept it on for quite some time but the stream doesn’t seem to come back online. I have checked and tried the following things.
Resizing the image from the companion camera interface re-enables the stream but it will drop again in a few minutes.
Opened the stream with VLC in debug mode. Still dropped after a few minutes from the log I concluded that the companion stopped sending frames and the connection timed out.
The internet connection is still performing at the same levels as before the drop.
The camera is still detected by the companion pi.
I’m kinda at a loss on how to further debug this problem. So any help or suggestions are welcome.
Tomorrow I have acces again to the rover and will post all the technical details of the set-up.
I would recommend to check your camera USB connection or do some bench test to check if the camera is overheating.
It helps if you have a second camera to test.
Thanks for the suggestions. We have a spare camara on the shelf so I’ll do some bench testing. Think the overheating might be a good thing to further investigate. It was an exceptionally hot day when I encountered the problem.
Temperature can be a huge problem inside the enclosure when exposed to the sun or in a hot environment, this is usually not a problem since the operation environment of the ROV (the underwater temperature) helps to decrease the temperature of the system.
It always help to put a wet towel over your ROV when exposed to directly sunlight, or you can throw it in the water to let it cool
Unfortunately, the camera cable came with the Bluerov loses its quality too fast. (For us after a month of operation) and drops connections which is a headache and wasted too much time for our company to find it out. We had to power the camera seperately and resolder all the connections from the cable to the USB port.
Overheating is also another issue, like now even in the office temperature we lose the RPi after 5 mins cause SoC temp reaches 85 degrees.
Can you share your mavproxy configuration ? Have you done any change on it ?
Adding multiples endpoints or using the wrong configuration may use the cpu heavily.
Here in Brazil we are having “more or less” the same problem.
The back of the camera chip reaches 50° Celsius at the lab, in a 22° controlled ambient temperature.
Is this an acceptable tempertature rase for this kind of chip/camera?
Hi @Jan -
The USB camera does indeed reach these temperatures, this is acceptable. If you notice the frame rate lowering, or the video dropping out, the temperature has become too high, and the hardware is going bad - this is a frequent issue we’ve come across in recent months.
Our team is working hard on a huge update/replacement to the camera that will put these issues to rest! It should be available by Q3 of 2024, if not earlier. Thanks for your patience and understanding!
