No video or stills with Raspicam on 0.10(8)

AstroBox Troubleshooting
#1

Trying to use 0.10(8) on a Raspberry Pi B+ to monitor a Printrbot Simple Metal. Can’t get stills or video, although I have no trouble using raspistill and raspivid to capture images and x.h264 files.

I’ve used both Firefox and Chrome, to no avail. I’ve also read pretty much everything I can find in this forum and elsewhere and can’t find anything that seems to work.

With Chrome, I get the “Oops” message and this entry appears in the astrobox.log:

2017-06-22 18:44:59,751 - astroprint.camera.v4l2.gstreamer.pipeline - ERROR - Unable to re-start pipeline process.

With Firefox, I get the same log entry, but the browser thinks it’s receiving video and the following appears on the screen:

screenshot.5.jpg731×510 53.4 KB

When attempting to take stills with Firefox, I get the following log entry:

2017-06-22 19:08:07,321 - astroprint.camera.v4l2.gstreamer.pipeline - ERROR - Unable to re-start pipeline process.
2017-06-22 19:02:59,498 - astroprint.camera.v4l2.gstreamer.pipeline - ERROR - Error during photo capture: no_process

With Chrome, stills nets me an error and the following log entries:

2017-06-22 19:04:02,096 - astroprint.camera:CameraInactivity - WARNING - Already running
2017-06-22 19:04:07,175 - astroprint.camera.v4l2.gstreamer.pipeline - ERROR - Unable to re-start pipeline process.
2017-06-22 19:04:07,184 - astroprint.camera.v4l2.gstreamer.pipeline - ERROR - Error during photo capture: no_process

Anyone have any ideas?

By the way, in case anyone runs into this, I had set my video memory low on my Pi B+. This is a bad idea: kills video processing. Keep it at 128MB at least.

Thanks,

Greg

#2

@Greg_Aicklen with this:

By the way, in case anyone runs into this, I had set my video memory low on my Pi B+. This is a bad idea: kills video processing. Keep it at 128MB at least.

Do you mean that this was your problem and is now working?

#3

No, that wasn’t my problem. Got to learn to be a little clearer, I guess.

With video memory set low, even the command line tools failed to grab video. With memory split returned to the factory setting of 128MB, now the command line tools work fine.

Regards,

Greg

#4

Could you try to increase to 256 to see if AstroPrint works? I really haven’t tested with anything lower.

#5

No change; still don’t get video, and I still get the same log message.

For verification:

With memory split at 256:

pi@botsky:~ $ free
         total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        249852     195136      54716       4816      13976     118804
-/+ buffers/cache:      62356     187496
Swap:       102396          0     102396

With memory split at 128:

pi@botsky:~ $ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        379576     140844     238732       4812      13032      68596
-/+ buffers/cache:      59216     320360
Swap:       102396          0     102396

Regards,

Greg

#6

What version of the pi cam? We have pi cams working for sure. Also you can try this as an alternative camera system: https://astroprint.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/216985186-Alternative-Camera-System-for-Raspberry-Pi

#7

Raspicam is 5Mp, version 1.3.

Setup alternative camera system, but no luck. When I try to take a still image, I get a “camera error” message and this log entry:

2017-06-23 00:23:23,860 - astroprint.camera.v4l2.mjpeg - ERROR - <urlopen error [Errno 111] Connection refused>

When I go for a video, I get nothing but “preparing video…” until I get another camera error. There is NO log message associated with the attempt to stream video, but this camera error (different from the still image capture error) implies that the camera can’t be found.

Greg

PS: The log does indicate that the camera was found:

2017-06-23 00:29:19,498 - astroprint.camera.v4l2.mjpeg - INFO - Camera detected on /dev/video0
2017-06-23 00:29:19,557 - astroprint.camera.v4l2.mjpeg - INFO - Found camera mmal service 16.1, encoding: h264 and size: 640x480. Source used: raspicam
#8

We haven’t tested with that camera. I don’t know why each version of the rapicam breaks compatibility :frowning:

#9

Can you tell me which versions of the raspicam you have tested with. I’m willing to spring for another camera; it’s not like I don’t have a half dozen RPis in the house, and another camera will find use.

Thanks for all the help.

Greg

#10

We successfully tested the 1.2 a while back. I’ll test again next week with 0.10(8) before you spend the money. Honestly USB cameras work best with our software and we test them all the time. Here’s a list of the ones we use. There are different qualities and price points here: https://astroprint.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203050005-What-cameras-can-I-use-with-AstroPrint-

The raspicam reduces the board memory and we need to run it via a V4l2 driver ( rather than direct ) because of the way our software is architected. Basically we try to support it because users ask but don’t regurlaly use it ourselves and don’t really recommend it.

#11

@Daniel

I also have PiCam 1.3 and it also does not work.
Any updates on getting this cam version to work?

Matthew