AR.Drone 2 camera access

There is lots of information out on the net about how to access the camera in the AR.Drone, but it is all for the original model.

In the AR.Drone 2, the cameras have been replaced and upgraded. So settings for v4l that worked to get data out of the camera need to be updated as well.

The front camera is on /dev/video1. If you are talking to V4L directly via ioctls and all that jazz, you need to request format V4L2_PIX_FMT_UYVY, width 1280 and height 720. UYVY format uses 2 bytes per pixel, so a full image is 1843200 bytes. fwrite those bytes from the mmap buffer into a file.

Or, from the command line, use yavta: yavta -c1 -F -f UYVY -s 1280x720 /dev/video1

Bring the raw file back to your Ubuntu laptop using FTP. Use “apt-get install dirac” to get UYVYtoRGB. Then use “UYVYtoRGB 1280 720 1 < in.uyvy | RGBtoBMP out .bmp 3 1 1 1280 720" to turn in.uyvy into out001.bmp. You can't get an image from the camera while program.elf is running. You need to kill the respawner and it with "kill -9". The downward facing camera is on /dev/video2. It is the same format, but 320x240. It gives bad data when you first connect to it, so you need to skip at least one frame. Here's a command that worked for me: "yavta -c5 --skip 4 -F -f UYVY -s 320x240 /dev/video2". The data ends up in frame-000004.bin. You need to adjust the width and height arguments to UYVYtoRGB and RGBtoBMP too, of course. When I get time, I'll work on the next steps to automating this into Godrone.