[ros-users] camera1394 - failure to start cameras

[Eric Perko]

Kim,

Another possibility would be to add the 'respawn="true"' attribute to the
camera1394_node tag in your launch file as long as camera1394 is exiting
when the camera doesn't start. See
http://www.ros.org/wiki/roslaunch/XML/node for the docs.

Making the driver more tolerant of finicky cameras wouldn't be a bad thing
though, in my opinion. We'd have to test it, but I can't see trying n open
attempts if the first (n-1) fail causing problems with cameras that already
open on the first try.

Does the camera have that same behavior on any computer you try? I've seen
some really crappy 1394 hardware that can make 1394 cameras behave badly or
just randomly die.

Another option would be to contact the manufacturer and see if that might be
corrected by a firmware update or a warranty repair :)

- Eric

On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 12:32 AM, Kim Houck <kim_houck at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I was wondering if anyone else has seen issues with camera1394 throwing
> an exception after failing to start the camera.  I have been dealing
> with an older firewire camera(dc1394 A) that often fails to start on the
> first try(this also occurs using the camera with opencv or the dc1394
> interface directly).
>
> When the camera fails to start properly the camera1394 node needs to be
> restarted to get get the camera to work, which isn't a problem for a
> stand alone node but gets aggravating when using launch files.  I made a
> change to openCamera in camera1394.cpp to have it try again to open the
> camera if it fails the first time and only give up and throw an
> exception if it fails twice.  I was wondering if anyone else has
> encountered this problem and if so if have they found a better solution
> for it?
>
> I'm not sure if this constitutes a bug/change request for camera1394,
> since it may be limited to a very small subset of hardware and I'm not
> sure if fixing this would cause problems for other camera hardware.
>
> Thanks.
>
> -Kim
>
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