<< return to Pixycam.com

Pixy2 - Raw Data Feed

I’m sorry if this is already a thread, i haven’t found one specifically answering my question however. I recently received a Pixy2 for a class project and our project is essentially to write a sensor driver for the Pixy2. My group is the only one to have this and our prof. couldn’t help us on this. Does anyone know how to access the raw video feed from the Pixy2 cam? I know for imu’s typically you can do cat /dev/usb/[device] but the Pixy cam doesn’t appear in my /dev folder (running ubuntu 16.0 LTS). Any help is greatly appreciated!!

Hey there,

unfortunately the expert @edge is out of town at the moment - but I’m pretty sure that there’s not an easy way to access the raw video feed of Pixy. It’s not really designed for that…PixyMon does pick up frames, so obviously there is a method but I believe it’s baked into that piece of software and not readily accessible. Pixy doesn’t act like a webcam.

We do offer an API called libpixyusb that allows access to many of the features of Pixy, more on that here: http://charmedlabs.github.io/pixy/index.html

Hope this helps!

Best,
Jesse

Thank you for the information! We gave up trying to access the pure raw image data and our professor wound up changing the scope of our project. We used the line tracking API to write our own scripts that determined length and angle of various vectors which then were translated into steering and velocity commands for a rover in Gazebo. This was all done using ROS and was good fun!

Sounds awesome! Nice work, and glad it worked out for you.

Let us know if we can help with anything else!

1 Like

Hey, I noticed this thread after trying to dig for a little while. I see that you have said that there is s o m e way to grab the raw feed from the Pixy2. My FRC team is trying to use it as a frame feed for our roborio, but have been unsuccessful. Has there been a developed method of doing this? We are currently using Labview. Thank you! ~Cameron

@edge perhaps can help…

Hello,
If you are using roboRIO, you are using I2C or SPI to communicate with Pixy2, correct? Unfortunately, the serial interfaces I2C, SPI and UART don’t support getting raw frames mostly because the datarates for these interfaces are low.

If you are using USB to communicate with your Pixy2, libpixyusb2 has a way to get raw frames, much like PixyMon does

But I don’t think this helps you (sorry) :frowning:

Edward