ROS Wrapper for TIS Camera

Camera Driver Installation Guide

The camera driver has two components

• tiscamera which is the core driver
• tiscamera-dutil which contains many additional useful features, such as tonemapping

Step 1/3: Install tiscamera Core Driver

For Intel-based processor, you may choose to install the official compiled tiscamera package from here: https://github.com/TheImagingSource/tiscamera/releases

Note:

• As of Jan 2021, we are using version 0.12.0
• For TX2 or Xavier, if cannot build from source, can try to install the official compiled tiscamera package tiscamera_0.12.0_arm64.deb directly.

However, it is strongly recommanded to build from source, for the main tiscamera driver, especially on Nvidia arm64 platform.

Build tiscamera From Source

0. Install GStreamer through apt first

1. Clone https://github.com/TheImagingSource/tiscamera and checkout the release version, for example v-tiscamera-0.12.0

   git clone https://github.com/TheImagingSource/tiscamera.git
   git checkout v-tiscamera-0.12.0
   

2. Change CMakeList.txt BUILD_TOOLS to ON

3. (Jetson TX2) Install dependencies gstreamer-1.0 libusb-1.0 libglib2.0 libgirepository1.0-dev libudev-dev libtinyxml-dev libzip-dev libnotify-dev

4. Install python dependencies python3-gi python3-pyqt5

5. Uninstall existing apt package sudo apt remove tiscamera

6. use CMake build and install:

   mkdir build && cd build
   cmake -DBUILD_ARAVIS=OFF ..
   make
   sudo make install

Step 2/3: Install tiscamera-dutils

Also install the dutils package here tiscamera-dutils_1.0.0.160 https://github.com/chengguizi/tiscamera_ros/tree/master/sdk_debs

Tip:

To verify driver installation, connect the camera using usb cable, then run tcam-capture, and there should be an option for tonemapping showing up. Otherwise, the installation is unsuccessful.

Also, in gst-inspect-1.0 tcambin, the dutil should have default to be true.

Step 3/3: Integrating with ROS: tiscamera_ros

The ROS driver could be found at https://github.com/chengguizi/tiscamera_ros/

Dependencies:

• mavlink (install by apt ros-melodic-mavlink)
• mavros (https://github.com/chengguizi/mavros, Feb 2021 Release)

There are two files important for configuration, in the launch folder

• the device_list file, which defines the camera string name, as well as serial number
  • hardware_sync_mode set to none if no hardware synchronisation is used
  • if hardware sync is used, it should set to slave
• the param file, which sets the exposure settings for all cameras

Tip: install missing ROS dependency with rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y (require python-rosdep package)

Add dialout Group

Remember to enable serial access, by adding current user to dialout group:

sudo adduser nvidia dialout

Get Started

After catkin build tiscamera_ros, the snapimage executable should reside in the build\tiscamera_ros\tests folder. It could be used to take snapshot images without running ROS.