Fast Image Saving on Raspberry Pi 3

This guide will give you hints on how to optimize the image saving on your Raspberry Pi 3 when using the Basler pylon Camera Software Suite and multiple Basler's dart USB3.0 cameras! The instructions in this guide may help you optimize your setup image acquistion process and prevent your application from running out of memory and loss image data.

Note: as image data is saved on the SD card, this may take up to 5 seconds for a single image to be saved. When working with multiple cameras this may become a huge issue. Read further to get that fixed on your Raspberry Pi 3.

Prerequisites

1. This guide assumes that you're running Ubuntu MATE 16.04 on your machine
2. This guide also assumes that you're using four Basler dart daA2500-14uc (or any other Basler dart or Basler pulse cameras)
3. Ensure your system's software is up-to-date by running the following commands from your terminal:
   #sudo apt-get update #sudo apt-get dist-upgrade #sudo raspi-update
4. Install the following libraries that the current project depend on:

#sudo apt-get install -y cmake #sudo apt-get install -y libopencv-dev #sudo  apt-get install -y libboost-all-dev

pylon

Pylon contains all the software we need for interacting with Basler cameras. Builds are provided for multiple platforms. This guide assumes that you are using the Basler pylon for Linux for ARM hardfloat version 5.0.5.9000-armhf or newer.

1. Download the latest pylon version from here, pick the hardfloat ARM version for Linux
2. Unpack the file to a directory of your choice
3. Follow the instructions in the INSTALL file. Do not attempt to run the pylon viewer as it is not bundled with ARM releases
4. After successful installation plug in e.g. your Basler USB camera
5. Now we will check if everything works. In your terminal move to pylon's Samples/Grab directory and execute make, then run ./Grab, you should see some text scrolling with information about pictures being grabbed

Give it a try

Download the sample project and give it a try now!

The images will be saved by default under:

/opt/images

PS: do not forget this is a sample private project without any warranty.