Set up the Vision Kit

Connect the camera to Skynode

Connect the camera to one of the USB ports present on Skynode using the provided cable. Attach Skynode to your developing PC and power it up as shown in: "Connecting to a device".

Software requirements

The necessary services come pre-installed in AuterionOS starting from version 2.15.10.

Verify the presence and status of the required apps and services (app-base-v2 and video2ros). This can be achieved in two different ways:

1. Via the auterion-cli app list command (as mentioned inside "Connecting to a device - Show a list of installed apps").

user@Laptop:~$ auterion-cli app list
App name                  Version    App status    App enable (autostart)    Service name    Service status    Service enable (autostart)    SSH port
------------------------  ---------  ------------  ------------------------  --------------  ----------------  ----------------------------  ----------
com.auterion.app-base-v2  v2         Installed                               base-image                                                      None
com.auterion.video2ros    0.5.0      running       enabled                   add-file        running           running                       14114
└─                                                                           gscam2          running           running                       None

2. Via the Skynode WebUI http://10.41.1.1/:

Additionally, the Web UI allows you to easily modify the configuration and settings of apps and services. To do that, just press on the icon shown in the top right corner of the application box and select the desired action. Configurations that are unique to a particular app or service can be modified via action buttons as shown above (e.g. "Add calibration file >").

The "video2ros" service

The activity performed by this service consists of acquiring the raw video frames sent to Skynode via USB and publish them inside the /camera/image_raw ROS2 topic. The topics published by AuterionOS apps or services will also be available inside any other app or service running on the same device. For 'video2ros', the rate at which the topic is published can be specified inside its settings by changing the "Frame rate" variable. The default camera settings are as follows:

Variable	Value
Frame rate	15
Width	1280
Height	720
Format	YUV422
Device	/dev/videoCV

To verify that the topic is being published you can use the ROS2 CLI commands from any desired app or service running on your device. For example, it is possible to check the ros2 topic list directly from the "video2ros" service. To do that, make sure that the service is running and follow the below listed points:

pc> ssh root@10.41.1.1    #SSH into Skynode

host> docker ps     #Copy the container ID for the desired app/service (e.g.: video2ros)
host> docker exec -ti <container-id> /bin/bash

app> source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash
app> ros2 topic list

Go to the next page to install and run an example app making use of the vision kit.