Hello, friends! It’s a lovely day to #godeep, and today we’re stoked to bring a couple of capable products into the picture.
Check out the New Product Video on Youtube:
Let’s bring our focus to the new Low-Light HD USB Camera. This camera is ideally suited to use underwater with excellent low-light performance, good color handling, and onboard video compression. A specially-chosen wide-angle, low distortion lens provides excellent picture quality on the ROV. With a 3D printed camera mount, it is a drop in replacement for the Raspberry Pi Camera on the BlueROV2.
Next up we have the Bar100 Depth/Pressure Sensor. It’s built around the Keller LD Series pressure/temperature sensor, which communicates via I2C communication, just like the Bar30 Pressure/Depth Sensor. It can measure up to 100 bar – that’s over 1000 meters water depth! It has a pressure resolution of 3 mbar, providing a depth measurement resolution of 3 cm in the water column.
The Bar100 is compatible with our Watertight Enclosure Series and we have new Arduino and Python libraries to interface with it. The sensor is already supported in ArduSub for use on the BlueROV2 and other ArduSub vehicles!
That’s it for today!
2 quick questions. Can I use more than one of the USB cameras with the Raspberry Pi simultaneously? and is it a higher resolution / better camera than the PI camera?
Good stuff! Looks like a camera upgrade is in order. The video comparison you did really shows it off well.
Hi Tim,
The resolution of the new camera is actually the same as the Rasperry Pi camera, but that is far from the only specification that determines overall image quality. As shown in the comparison shots of the video, the color accuracy and low light capability is vastly better, thanks to the much larger sensor. The overall image is a bit clearer and sharper as well, especially in realistic conditions where visibility isn’t ideal. The field of view is also a bit narrower, but still plenty wide for a good flying experience, allowing for the elimination of distortion that can warp objects and misrepresent scale. We’ve been using this camera exclusively in all our recent dives, and its a night and day difference!
Technically, I believe it is possible to have multiple video streams going at the same time, but we are still working on adding support for this in QGroundCrontrol. I think @jwalser can shed some more light on this.
-Adam
Yes, it is certainly possible to stream multiple USB cameras and the Pi camera at the same time. We have not come up with a way to do this using only QGC, though.