[ros-users] Digital Camera 1394 in ROS?

Michael Quinlan mquinlan at cs.utexas.edu
Wed Mar 10 17:34:38 UTC 2010


This raises a bit of a issue I've had and I know students have when
looking for packages to achieve a task.

If I search for '1394' I get 6 results, if I search for 'camera' I get
47 results and none of these include the Brown probe package (since it
must not include these key words?). While the search mechanism allows
people to see what exists it offers little advice on what package to
select. In reality we have to pick based on the rough description
given by the developer, for example, what is the difference between
usc_cameradc1394 and cameradc1394 ? If we make the wrong decision,
then we may waste substantial time trying to integrate the wrong
package.

As the number of packages grows we are going to see many duplicate
packages basically doing the same thing (maybe with a few small custom
modifications). Without an imposed minimum level of documentation
users will be swamped with uninformative search results. I know nobody
likes documentation, but as soon as we face 'search result spam' the
likelihood of us all becoming frustrated and just re-implementing our
own packages increases.


On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 11:11 AM, Jack O'Quin <jack.oquin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 10:51 AM, Ken Conley <kwc at willowgarage.com> wrote:
>>> On a recent boxturtle ROS install, the rosmake will fail because
>>> cameradc1394 depends on libdc1394v2, which is no longer being
>>> distributed. So, users either have to edit your manifest.xml to remove
>>> that dependency (which is still needed on Ubuntu Hardy), or they have
>>> to find and install the SVN repository for the
>>> camera_drivers_experimental package (doable, but not trivial).
>>
>> It seems that libdc1394v2 is a good candidate for converting into a
>> rosdep.  For boost and log4cxx, which we have to specially install on
>> Hardy, we use rosdep's ability to include custom install scripts for
>> that platform. Otherwise, we just use the debian package.
>>
>> You can look at ros/rosdep.yaml under 'boost' and 'log4cxx' for
>> examples. This would require that the cameradc1394 be part of a stack,
>> as rosdep.yaml files are associated with stacks.
>
> That sounds like a good idea. There should be a stack containing
> cameracd1394, anyway.
>
> Ideally, it should be part of the camera_drivers stack, but that's
> another discussion.  :-)
> --
>  joq
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