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Misty Community Forum

[RESOLVED] Taking pictures / videos

Bugs
#1

When I use command center to take a picture with the 4k camera it works and when I take a picture with the wide-angle, it works. BUT, when I try to record a video It doesn’t seem to do anything and then the picture function fails to work…OR it will work and take a video… I tried to take a video and then move the head around while the video was recording and when I tried to replay the video, it froze up and nothing worked (in relation to the picture and video functions)… If i restart taking pictures works again but once i try to use the video function everything goes haywire until i reboot.
Are these know issues?

edit: audio recording functions not working either.

2nd edit: Part of the original problem was a disconnection from the network but even with a continuous connection, the video record session stopped at 10 seconds automatically and the ability to take a picture after using the video function was spotty… the whole picture / video process seems very clunky.
Is anyone having similar experiences?

Thanks,
Anthony

#2

A few caveats:

  • Currently, video recording is capped at 10 seconds. This is documented: Misty Docs | REST API This is scheduled to change, however there have been higher priorities
  • Currently, taking still 4k images and recording videos is being done in mutually exclusive services and switching from one to the other will incur some latency due to switching processes. This is not ideal and it is scheduled to change, but once again there were things with higher priority needed to get the robot manufactured. The latency is documented in the docs.

Yes the whole picture/video process can be improved. Unfortunately there is only so much available bandwidth at a time. I encourage you to go suggest things for the roadmap or vote on existing items as this will feed into our future prioritization of new features, fixes, improvements.

#3

Hi @stackchain, thanks for posting about your experience! Regarding the following:

I tried to take a video and then move the head around while the video was recording and when I tried to replay the video, it froze up and nothing worked (in relation to the picture and video functions)… If i restart taking pictures works again but once i try to use the video function everything goes haywire until i reboot.

There is some latency between using the camera to take a picture and the service becoming available to record videos, for the reasons that @vlad mentioned. My understanding is the service becomes available fairly quickly – I’ll find out from someone closer to the system exactly how long we expect the transition to take, and post here when I have more detailed information to share.

To troubleshoot this kind of issue, you can always open up the JavaScript console in the Command Center web page. Misty’s response to any requests you send via the Command Center (including error messages) show up here. To open the web console in Chrome, use Ctrl + Shift + J (Windows/Linux) / Cmd + Option + J (Mac).

With the console open, If you try to record a video / take a picture before the service is available, you’ll see a message like this:
58%20PM
or this:
46%20PM

If you’re running into an issue where, after taking a picture, the service never becomes available for recording a video (or takes a really long time), that’s where I think we’d want to dig in a bit more, so please let us know if that matches your experience!

Regarding this:

audio recording functions not working either.

There is a known issue in the current release related to recording audio via Misty’s REST API / the Command Center interface. We’re actively working on this and hope to release a fix soon!

#6

Hi @stackchain,

Regarding this:

After taking a picture, you can expect the camera to become available to record a video after about 1 second; after recording a video, you can expect the camera to become available for taking pictures after around 8 seconds.

Edit: I’ve spoken a bit more with our team about this, and in our quality testing we’ve actually seen that it’s fairly common for the elapsed time before being able to successfully take a picture to be in the 15 - 20 second range. In some instances it took around 40 seconds, and in just one observed case it took 88 seconds for the camera to become available for taking pictures. If you’re experiencing latency even greater than this, please let us know!