Driver for HERO3 Camera?

I have a Logitech USB camera interfaced to ROS. But after adding a Hero3 camera to my 'bot, I'd like to use it for both ROS blob tracking and video capture.

Is there a way to do this? There is a USB connector on the camera for updating from a PC.

Alan KM6VV

Asked by KM6VV on 2013-10-31 10:14:07 UTC

Comments

Are you talking about the GoPro Hero3?

Asked by jbohren on 2013-10-31 10:38:09 UTC

yes. Seems like there should be a way.... Alan

Asked by KM6VV on 2013-11-04 19:30:23 UTC

Answers

As far as I know, the GoPro can't stream over USB, it just has a "live" composite video feed, which you'd need to capture with additional hardware. The GoPro Hero3, however, can stream over wifi, but there's a pretty substantial delay (on the order of seconds) You can see a tutorial here for getting the URI for that stream: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1XaBJZ8Xcg Then you can probably use the gscam pacakge to convert that stream to a ROS camera topic.

Asked by jbohren on 2013-11-05 06:11:58 UTC

Comments

Thanks for the URL, Youtube video makes it look like it would be too slow for a blob camera.

Asked by KM6VV on 2013-11-07 17:37:56 UTC

This is a bit of but for anyone who's googling doing this at the moment. I've just setup a ROS system using a GoPro hero 3. It's not the cheapest but I'm using an external HDMI capture dongle to convert the live HDMI stream into a video4linux compatible camera feed.

http://www.magewell.com/usb-capture-hdmi This is the capture device I'm running, it works with linux out of the box and is pretty small so it'll tuck into a robot quite easily.

This setup gives me by far the best image quality I've ever seen for a (slightly over the top) USB web-cam.

Asked by PeteBlackerThe3rd on 2016-02-26 13:42:05 UTC

Comments

What kind of loads did you see on your CPU when using the video-capture device.

Asked by rumman on 2016-03-05 02:10:14 UTC

Hi Rumman, very little, the device appears just like a USB webcam from the point of view of the computer. It connects through a USB3 port. All the hard work of capturing the HDMI feed is done in the external hardware. The only downside is the £200 price tag!

Asked by PeteBlackerThe3rd on 2016-03-27 12:20:14 UTC