Follow Up (Assembly; Google Group; Development Wiki)

[David Lang]

Hi all,

First of all, thank you all for coming yesterday! It was great to have so many of you in one place.

To follow up on a few items:

1) If you have a moment, please share anything you learned/photo'd/documented yesterday and edit the Assembly section of the Wiki: http://wiki.openrov.com/index.php/Assembly

The more of us that take the time to edit and refine the build instructions, the better for everyone. 

2) We've started a Google Group (invitation to follow) to serve as a mailing list for the developers of OpenROV. As we discussed yesterday, we need to have a better way to communicate internally amongst the developers. We can talk further about the best way to do that - a number of folks like Jira - but the google group is the first step. 

3) Also on that note, I've discussed with many of you the idea of using the Wiki Forum as a developers forum. In the long run, having the critical development conversations outside of Ning is a good idea and this also allows it to be a more focused conversation. There's also a section there for Build Logs, which would be great to have links to all of your works in process. Here's the link: http://wiki.openrov.com/index.php/Special:WikiForum 

As always, let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. 

Thanks!

David

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OpenROV.com

[Bran Sorem]

You are awesome!  I will try this tonight. 

- Bran Sorem

On Aug 7, 2012, at 5:37 PM, Stephen Olsen <ste...@embeddedartisan.com> wrote:

OpenROVers,

Thanks for the build session on Sunday afternoon.  While I did not make as much progress as I would have liked, I did get the chassis built.

Someone told me (Eric) that there was a likely move away from the HD-5000 webcam because among other things the autofocus would periodically refocus blurring the image every few seconds.  Very annoying.

I did some research and here is how you disable auto focus on Ubuntu with the v4l2 command line tool uvcdyntrl: 

• uvcdynctrl -s "Focus, Auto" 0

Then to set it manually enter the command:

•  uvcdynctrl -s "Focus (absolute)" $amt

where $amt is between 0 and 40. 

The smallest focal length is set with 40 which will focus on an object about Two inches away.  The value 0 is setting the distance at infinity.  20 seems to be a good midpoint and seeing as we will likely be in not so clear water, having a focal depth that is variable rather than set at infinity is a good idea that should bring clearer images in murky water.

I tested this with ubuntu on my x86 based laptop and it works great.  I did not attempt on the beaglebone.

Can someone try this on the beaglebone running ubuntu?

It may be as simple as:  sudo apt-get install uvcdynctrl

Not sure what other webcams were mentioned, but before we design this webcam out because of autofocus, know that it is software controllable.

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Sincerely,

Stephen Olsen
Ste...@EmbeddedArtisan.com
(510)589-3245

[Brad Collette]

I never saw a response but I tried this on my beaglebone running ubuntu and it worked great.  I'm going to add a tip on the wiki in the troubleshooting section.   Thanks Stephen.

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Brad Collette
573-427-7132