trigonometry, kafka, and drone tracking walk into a bar
This program controls AXIS cameras supporting VAPIX to track drones and record video of the drones. It has been customized for NC State's AERPAW program.
These options are all in config.yml.
| Configuration Option | Description |
|---|---|
| camera/alt | The altitude (from sea level) for the camera's lens. |
| camera/lat, camera/long | The latitude and longitude of the camera's lens. |
| camera/offset | The camera's offset from north (clockwise) |
| camera/deactivate_pos/pan, camera/deactivate_pos/tilt | The pan/tilt to deactivate the camera to when it is not in use. |
| camera/min_step | The minimum change in the pan/tilt (degrees) from the camera's current position for the program to send an update |
| camera/min_zoom_step | The minimum change in the zoom cycles from the camera's current zoom for the program to send an update |
| camera/delay | The delay after the program detects it should not be recording for the camera to stop recording. |
| camera/maximum_zoom | The maximum zoom of the camera. |
| camera/zoom_error | How much space to have outside of the zoom (1.2 has 20% more space, 0.8 has 80% of the space) |
| camera/lead | The amount of seconds to lead the drone based on its velocity. |
| camera/move | Whether the camera should actually be connected to. If false, the camera_login section of the config is not required to be set. |
| camera/store_recordings | The path to store the exported recordings in, |
| camera/stop_recording_after | The amount of time after the last packet is received from Kafka before the recording should be stopped and the camera deactivated |
| drone/x, drone/y, drone/z | The size of the drone (height, width, depth) |
| scale/dist, scale/width | At 1x zoom, looking straight ahead, the camera's horizontal FOV at dist meters away is width. This has been calibrated for the AXIS Q-8615E PTZ camera. |
| camera_login/ip, camera_login/username, camera_login/password | The ip, username, and password of the camera. |
| kafka/ip | The ip of the Kafka server to connect to for both command and data updates |
| kafka/data_topic, kafka/command_topic | The topics the program should receive data and command information from, respectively |
| kafka/hz | The amount of times per second to check for updates on both data and command streams |
| logs | The log level of the program. Valid options: "debug" "info" "warning" "error" |
| Utility Purpose | Description |
|---|---|
cameracontroller.py |
A simple test program that will attempt to connect to and control the camera using the keyboard. |
submit_info.py |
A program to send a certain latitude, longitude and altitude to the camera a certain amount of times with a certain amount of delay in between each packet. |
test_submit.py |
A program that is the same as submit_info.py, except it sends close, random positions around the camera. You will need to manually edit the file to set these parameters. |
This program is designed to be run in a Dockerfile.
Use Docker Compose to build: sudo docker compose build && sudo docker compose up -d
The program will store recordings in the /opt/DroneTracker/recordings folder unless you change it in the docker-compose.yml