[ros-users] camera1394 - failure to start cameras

[Kim Houck]

  Eric,

     I tried the cameras on another computer with different 
hardware(still running ubuntu lucid) and had the same problem.  
Unfortunately the node doesn't die when the camera fails, it would make 
life much easier if it did.

Thanks for the tips though, maybe the manufacturer can help, it sounds 
the whole 1394 system can be a bit finicky sometimes, I never thought of 
the 1394 card being part of the problem, but I've seen a lot of issues 
with the Linux drivers.

-Kim

On 07/11/2010 12:11 AM, Eric Perko wrote:
> 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 
> <mailto: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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