Remarks on PTZ and Firewire

Mick Walters (UH)
The IEEE 1394 interface has a standard specifaction for downloading video and controlling digital cameras. I do not htink it includes control of the ptz mechanism.

Incidently, the PeopleBot ptz camera uses two interfaces to the control computer;- a video capture card (P200 on our PoepleBots)to digitise the video, and a seperate serial link to control the ptz, zoom etc. through aria (though the ptz instruction set is plain ascii text and easy to implement in your own program or device driver!). Incidently, the version of Aria which we use on our peopleBots has a buggy VCC4 ptz cam driver, which can cause the program to hang on exit sometimes! I assume this has beem rectified in more recent verisons!

There may be a camera available which allows the ptz to be controlled through the IEEE 1394 Interface, but I can only find ptz cameras which have the ptz part controlled through a seperate (usually rs232) input(including those with IEEE 1394 DV output). Therefore it seems if you want to control the pan and tilt (and zoom etc.) part of the camera, you will need to use another link (e.g. serial port or IR etc.). You could probably make this work under ARIA fairly easily (if the camera ptz link is not already supported), as that part of the software is open source. The video from the PeopleBots cam is streamed to a seperate (closed source) program effectively, which performs the vision processing, then sends the output back to Aria for action etc.
Mick (UH)