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The Imaging Source USB3.1 IMX Board Cameras

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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#

  1. Install GStreamer through apt first

  2. 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.gitgit checkout v-tiscamera-0.12.0

  3. Change CMakeList.txt BUILD_TOOLS to ON

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

  5. Install python dependencies python3-gi python3-pyqt5

  6. Uninstall existing apt package sudo apt remove tiscamera

  7. use CMake build and install:

    mkdir build && cd buildcmake -DBUILD_ARAVIS=OFF ..makesudo 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:

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

Wiring for Hardware Synchronisation#

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