I spent a day trying to modify Joe B.'s LLO camera client-server code without ultimate success. His codes now runs without throwing any errors, but something inside the black-box handoff of his camera source code to gstreamer appears to be SILENTLY FAILING. Gautam suggested a call with Joe B., which I think is worth a try.

In the meantime, I've impemented a simple Python video feed streamer which does work, and which students can use as a base framework to implement more complicated things (e.g., stream multiple feeds in one window, save a video stream movie or animation).

It uses the same PyPylon API to interface with the GigE cameras as does Joe's code. However, it uses matplotlib instead of gstreamer to render the imaging. The matplotlib code is optimized for maximum refresh rate and I observed it to achieve ~5 Hz for a single video feed. However, this demo code does not set any custom cameras settings (it just initializes a camera with its defaults), so it's quite possible that the refresh rate is actually limited by, e.g., the camera exposure time.

Location of the code (on the shared network drive):

/opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/GigE/demo_with_mpl/stream_camera_to_mpl.py

This demo initializes a single GigE camera with its default settings and continuously streams its video feed in a pop-up window. It runs continuously until the window is closed. I installed PyPylon from source on the SL7 machine (rossa) and have only tested it on that machine. I believe it should work on all our versions of Linux, but if not, run the camera software on rossa for now.

Usage:

From within the above directory, the code is executed as 

$python stream_camera_to_mpl.py [Camera IP address]

with a single argument specifying the IP address of the desired camera. At the time I tested, there was only one GigE camera on our network, at 192.168.113.152.