[ros-users] Prosilica GC1020

[Blaise Gassend]

Hi Rene,

Thanks for the feedback!

> First of all, the corresponding tutorial [1] contains launch files that
> don't seem to match the software in C Turtle. The sample launch files
> distributed along with the prosilica_camera package, however, work.

> As for using the driver with the GC1020, I had to uncomment all calls to
> cam_->setWhiteBalance(...) in prosilica_node.cpp to prevent the node
> from getting stuck at this warning:
>
> Could it be that some Prosilica models don't support automatic white
> balancing? Could the driver handle this case more gracefully?

Making the setWhiteBalance call should be ticketed here:
https://code.ros.org/trac/ros-pkg

I think that you should be able to determine whether your camera has
automatic white balance by playing around with SampleViewer in the
prosilica_gige_sdk package. Are there attributes related to AWB, for
example?

> [ WARN] [1286554890.197190653]: Reconfigure callback failed with
> exception Couldn't set white balance mode: Camera or attribute not
> found:
>
>
> The driver also complains about not being able to read the intrinsics
> from the camera. This is just a warning and I suspect its origin is the
> fact that no intrinsic parameters have been written to the user memory
> area yet.

Correct. This is normal until you calibrate the camera.

> Another issue was caused by the default packet filter ("firewall")
> configuration in Fedora which leads to the subtle failure mode where
> communication on the control port works but no images get through. I
> eventually figured this out but a warning in the wiki documentation
> might be useful.

Since you are the only person who knows the specifics of this problem,
it would be really useful if you put a few lines about the symptoms
and how you solved the problem on the troubleshooting page:

http://www.ros.org/wiki/prosilica_camera/Troubleshooting

If you do not yet have an account, you can create yourself one.

> Next on my list is getting two GC1020s to work in a stereo setup. I
> don't know when I'll get around to that yet, though.

Here I believe that your main problem will be getting the timestamps
from the two cameras to exactly match. I have heard that there is a
node to do this, but am not sure off-hand what it is called. It is on
a non-WG repo.

Blaise