[TriEmbed] Best way to get several composite video streams into a raspberry pi?

Brian triembed at undecidedgames.net
Fri Jan 4 11:20:42 CST 2019


Hi Rodney,

Thanks for the thoughts!  I'm hoping that a USB capture device would 
send video in some reasonably-well-compressed format that wouldn't tax 
the USB bus too heavily to support so many cameras, but you may be right 
that it's too much to ask of one USB bus to suck video from five cameras.

 > Or is the issue that you want to use a prebuilt camera in a housing
 > designed for the purpose you have in mind?

Yes, precisely.  These are ~$20 cameras already designed and housed for 
mounting to the outside of a motor vehicle, i.e., already manufactured 
with (ostensibly) the necessary protections against the elements.  Also 
they're quite small (under a cubic inch), compared to the housing 
requirements for an entire Pi + Camera.

If the USB bus can't handle the bandwidth of all the cameras, I'm not 
totally averse to an Ethernet-based Pi-per-camera solution, but that 
would drive the price up significantly; I suspect trying to establish a 
reliable WiFi network around a 1990 8-cylinder Ford box truck is going 
to be more trouble than it's worth, so I wouldn't be able to use Pi Zero 
Ws.

 > They could also store data off on a separate hidden RPi + SD card

This is a system to show me live video while I'm piloting the vehicle; 
imagery after-the-fact is (hopefully) of no use.  That said, I don't 
need 30 FPS, either; 4-5 FPS is probably enough to avoid merging into an 
occupied lane or backing into something solid.  I figure/hope that the 
Pi is powerful enough to use OpenGL to composite 3 or 4 streams into one 
display.

-B

<snip>




More information about the TriEmbed mailing list