[ros-users] Digital Camera 1394 in ROS?

[Jack O'Quin]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 11:00 AM, Trevor Jay <tjay at cs.brown.edu> wrote:
> As long as the 1394 camera in question appears as a "normal" firewire
> camera (i.e. it's not a Swiss Ranger or other such device), the Brown
> ROS Pkg has a package named "probe" (soon to be renamed
> "gstreamer_camera") that may suit your needs. It plugs into a
> gstreamer pipeline and publishes the images to a ROS image transport.
> Gstreamer has firewire support, so you should be able to build an
> appropriate pipeline and get the image stream you want. There might be
> issues with accessing the camera/image settings, but it could be a
> stopgap solution provided the camera(s) you want to use aren't too
> exotic.
>
> I mention it because probe has very few dependencies (except for the
> Gstreamer library and plugins). Currently, probe depends only on
> image_transport and sensor_msgs.

Thanks for the suggestion, Trevor. I took a look at on Google code. Is
the version in trunk/unstable/probe the current version? I see other
similar packages in different parts of the tree.

A few minutes looking at gstreamer docs suggests that it supports
Digital Video 1394, but not Digital Camera 1394. Is that correct?

My naive understanding is that DV is a different class of devices from
DC speaking a different protocol (although both use the 1394 bus to
transfer data). I am looking for a DC driver.

Do some people have a requirement for DV, too? Shouldn't that be a
different driver?

Pardon me if these questions are silly, but I would be reluctant to
add a future dependency on gstreamer to the camera_drivers stack
without a better understanding of the issues.

Regards,
-- 
 joq