As I mentioned in my previous post, I had only had limited success with the Caspa VL and Logitech UVC cameras. While both cameras work with the Gumstix, the Caspa seems to take poor images while the Logitech USB camera performance is limited by low USB bandwidth. Therefore, I have decided to try my luck with cameras from e-Con Systems.
video
Video encoding using the DSP is working
I’m happy to report that I am now able to encode video on the Gumstix Overo Water using the DSP in the OMAP3530. It wasn’t difficult to make it work but it took several attempts at building the kernel before I got it right and, as you might know, cross compilation takes time.
Work continues on the OMAP3 VPU
A year has passed since we had a Gumstix Overo based video recorder onboard an amateur rocket and it is time to resume working on it. This time I will continue towards the original goal, namely live radio transmission of video encoded using the built-in DSP.
x264enc problem in GStreamer video switcher solved
Back in August 2010 I ran a brief experiment using GstInputSelector to switch between various video sources. You may have noticed that it was using Theora encoder while most of my other DVB experiments used H.264 encoder in MPEG-TS container. The reason for this was that I could not make x264enc work in the pipeline used for the video switcher.
Successful flight and a crash landing
Oct 3, 2010 – Danish Space Challenge (DSC) held a Rocket Festival at Borris Sønderland, Denmark, where five rockets built by German and Danish students were launched together with one of DSC’s own rockets. For the first time, the DSC rocket was flying an Arduino Duemilanove based flight computer which was responsible for releasing the parachute. This worked well. The payload in the rocket consisted of the digital video recorder built by yours truly, based on the Gumstix Overo Fire embedded Linux computer that I have been blogging about during the last few weeks, see here.
Rocket integration
Wednesday evening the Logitech Webcam Pro 9000 UVC camera and the Gumstix Overo Fire based video recorder have been integrated into the rocket. I will not have access to them before the launch day on Sunday. Shown below is the camera and video recorder integrated into the rocket.
Pre-flight mockup
Wednesday, the Gumstix Overo Fire-based video recorder was finally assembled and wired as it would go on the rocket.
Video recorder update
I have been quite busy since the last update trying various options for recording MJPG video using a Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 and the Gumstix Overo Fire embedded computer. The good news is that there has been significant progress reported in the following sections.
Gumstix Overo Fire status and re-scoping the project
With only two weeks left until the flight opportunity it was time to make status and try to assess how much I can finish until the launch.
GstInputSelector to switch between different cameras
An email on the gst-devel mailing list last week pointed me to a rather interesting example in the gst-python repository: switch.py – shows how to use the GstInputSelector element in a Python script to select between different input streams. When I looked at the example I thought right away that it would be cool to use it to switch between different cameras in my simple DVB setup that uses Gstreamer and GNU Radio.