Hello vvvvorum!
I want to connect 50 cameras Logitech and save photos using
“writer” node 50 cameras simultaneously.
My question is, can I bridge the 50 cameras in BBBB and getting their texture?
Will I have save 50 images at the same time?
This is cam: http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Portable-1080p-Webcam-Autofocus/dp/B004YW7WCY
Can anyone help me, tks!
maybe vvvv50 can do it!
if not,
I think using multiple instances and shared texture would be the way to go.
BUT
The bottleneck is going to be the usb bandwidth
check:
If photo is what you need, I think you should check security cameras hardware/soft. maybe some ip solution
In my opinion it will be absolutely imposible!
often you are getting problems with 2 cameras at the same time. not so much a problem of vvvv but windows driver management.
with openCV nodes you might be in luck and be able to run 3 or even 4 cameras but than you are realy in luck and probably have to invest a lot of time to make it work
more cameras you can go for network cameras that run independently or old school coax cables with capture cards but there you also need expensive hardware and multiple computers
HI! Thank you guys for your answers!
Hi @manuel
I understand you correctly, if I can connect
50 camera to the computer, then they are connected to 4v?
@isdzaurov yes, if you can connect the cameras to your computer, you can use them in vvvv… all at the same time, provided that the computer and USB bus are fast enough to have it running smoothly.
50 cameras of any resolution is a lot though, so the problem is not so much on the vvvv side as it is on the “find a system that can handle 50 cameras at the same time” side.
first off, you need to find a camera with drivers that behave nicely with that many cameras, not sure which to get other than expensive industrial cameras or using broadcast capture cards like the ones from black magic or datapath.
second you need to figure out how many computers you will need, maybe you can use boygrouping to use multiple computers to get the number of images you need, how many you need must be determined by testing it out.
once you have figured this out, you should share the results here, I can imagine people being curious to see your results
May be using just ip cams will simplify your life :-) so you load the images over http. If you are in love with the webcams that you linked and want to use, you can check if they can run on raspberryPI so you can make a small program to take photos and send the last photo over http, basically turning them in wireless ip cams, but there are good options out there out-of-the-box already :-)
Cheers
Hi guys!
I found an example of what I want to do, only then to GouPro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIiPyEyJb0o
My idea is different in that the person will get the result immediately after the jump, there will be a long installation. 4v he will do
hm, idea from looking at your example video:
if you don’t need all the webcam feeds all the time, it might be worth considering taking some cameras, which you can quickly disable/shut down. so there will always only be 3-4 in use at the same time…
i remember (at a node?) a touchscreen with ~50 cameras in one system, it was running linux
The RPi is actually a good idea, you can get a dedicated camera and a usb wifi dongle, that will set you back at around 70 euros per camera.
Get a good router and write down a simple script to take the picture when receiving a given command from vvvv, see cgwin shell execute etc., then scp or rcp all the pictures back to vvvv and compose upon receiving.
It should be pretty fast.
I’ve had 12 USB Logitech webcams running on 1 PC
StarTech USB 2.0 host boards, with 1 root hub per port, 1 camera per port
The system became unstable. The solution was to revert the drivers to generic camera drivers (uninstall the logitech stuff)
Touched 30fps at 720p across all the cameras, but toned it down for stability. That was 2 years ago.
The question is always how much resolution you need. If you need something like 480p (DVD quality), then it might be possible (480p is 1/6th the bandwidth of 1080p). In total you’d need bandwidth of just over 8 FHD streams (= 2 * 4K streams).
You’re definitely at the limits there, especially if you want to record to disk.
Your best bet is going to be using IP cameras, perhaps even with dual streams (low res stream for preview, high res stream for when you need it). Otherwise streaming pre-compressed frames which you can stream to disk (e.g. MJPEG or h264)
I think that unless the IP cameras have their own system to save the image locally (internal OS or some kind of firmware), you wouldn t have the proper synchronization getting the images over the net. I mean it depends prety much on own you acquire the images.
S.
here few more thoughts on the topic
if you use ethernet, rPI +usb cam:
you can downscale to 47 cams (47 cams + 1 host PC) connected by ethernet cables
you will need a some sort of 50 port gigabit ethernet switch: here a x48 port one for 377 euro http://www.kab24.de/netzwerk/netgear-prosafe-48-port-gigabit-smart-switch-gs748t.html?gclid=CM20wbDn58gCFSgFwwod6rYI7w
47 rPIs (38 euro each) 1786 euro
47 USB cams: here a list of usb cams supported by rPI: http://elinux.org/RPi_USB_Webcams
let’s assume a budget of 30 euro per cam, this makes around 1500
48 x ethernet cables: that’s around 250 euro
you can make each rPI to trigger the next by sending its image, some sort of circular “mesh” network (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_network) and avoid the ethernet switch, and stack the images in a mjpeg file, that’s already video ;) so, every node, adds a frame, so to say,
the last node is the output PC running VVVV and there is a patch that can read & display mjpeg stream
so all together you end up somewhere around 4000 euro, which is very much an estimation, excluding the host PC that will process all the images and do the sync(option 1) and the final visualisation
in both options there will be some varying in the timing due to the ethernet latency, but may be it will be acceptable
You will need a small saving an image program on trigger sent by UDP, I guess such a program is rather easy to make
Edit: if you want to do more precise sync, you can use one of the the GPIO of the rPIs to trigger the shot on precise time point
just my 5cents
good luck and regards
+1 for the GPIO idea
for the rest I d go wifi, you can get 150MBs dongles for 8 euros, it would take some time to get all the images though.
@io: The Wifi, for sure is more convenient, but for such an installation, wired lan might be way faster and reliable, especially if one uses the ring network topology where every node adds a frame and trigger the next one ;) you can add easily more nodes (until you reach the limit of the bandwidth at the last node, I guess)
cheers