Skip to content
  • Categories
  • Recent
  • Tags
  • Popular
  • Users
  • Groups
Collapse
Brand Logo

ModalAI Forum

  1. ModalAI Support Forum
  2. Ask your questions right here!
  3. no data while querying /run/mpa/tflight_data/request using Python

no data while querying /run/mpa/tflight_data/request using Python

Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Ask your questions right here!
18 Posts 2 Posters 3.6k Views 2 Watching
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as topic
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
  • ? A Former User

    @sansoy

    Hey, happy to try and help with this!

    I would really advise you to use libmodal-pipe which is a library we developed just for reading to and from pipes quickly, you can take a look at the documentation here and the source code here. I'm not an expert on the library but I believe it's needed in order to actually get data from a pipe. On a call to pipe_client_open(), the server pipe actually opens up a request to have data published as READONLY to the client pipe. This isn't to say the code you've written is wrong, but I do think you actually have to make this function call in order to "open up the pipe" and receive data on the other side.

    It would be most ideal to do all of your coding in C/C++ as this is what libmodal-pipe is written in. In that case, you could just open up a client pipe and on each callback have the function print out the detection data you're looking to print out. If you want to retain your Python script, though, you might write a very small helper script in C/C++ to open up that client pipe using libmodal-pipe and then use a a more general format or method to pass the data to your Python script.

    Hope this helps!!

    Thomas Patton
    thomas.patton@modalai.com

    S Offline
    S Offline
    sansoy
    Contributor
    wrote on last edited by
    #5

    @thomas ok massive confusion.

    i was able to download the example hello scripts and compile them and they work fine.
    modal-hello-client.c
    modal-hello-pause.c
    modal-hello-server.c
    modal-hello-sink.c
    modal-kill-pipe.c
    modal-pipe-ping.c

    i then made copies of these and replaced hello with tflite_data and compiled successfuly
    however, i cant seem to tie into tflite_data.

    so when i'm running voxl-tflite-server two pipes show up, ie tflite and tflite_data

    Doesnt that mean these pipes open already?

    i tried my modal-tflite_data-client and got the following error

    channel 0 connected to server
    sending tflite_data to server control pipe
    failed to send control command to server
    ERROR: control pipe not available
    ERROR, pipe is not of type "text"
    closing

    i just want to get the box coordinates from the pipe. Help me Obi Wan Kenobi!

    ? 1 Reply Last reply
    0
    • S sansoy

      @thomas ok massive confusion.

      i was able to download the example hello scripts and compile them and they work fine.
      modal-hello-client.c
      modal-hello-pause.c
      modal-hello-server.c
      modal-hello-sink.c
      modal-kill-pipe.c
      modal-pipe-ping.c

      i then made copies of these and replaced hello with tflite_data and compiled successfuly
      however, i cant seem to tie into tflite_data.

      so when i'm running voxl-tflite-server two pipes show up, ie tflite and tflite_data

      Doesnt that mean these pipes open already?

      i tried my modal-tflite_data-client and got the following error

      channel 0 connected to server
      sending tflite_data to server control pipe
      failed to send control command to server
      ERROR: control pipe not available
      ERROR, pipe is not of type "text"
      closing

      i just want to get the box coordinates from the pipe. Help me Obi Wan Kenobi!

      ? Offline
      ? Offline
      A Former User
      wrote on last edited by
      #6

      @sansoy

      I appreciate that you think I've ascended to the Jedi level... I don't know if I agree but I'll keep trying to help you out!

      You're getting the error because of the line that has the pipe_is_type() function. That function is, for example purposes, checking that a pipe has type "text" which is the type the pipe is publishing in the example code.

      But you're modifying the example code to read from a different pipe and so the type might not be text. To check what type was being published to the pipe, I ran:

      voxl2:/$ cat /run/mpa/tflite_data/info
      {
      	"name":	"tflite_data",
      	"location":	"/run/mpa/tflite_data/",
      	"type":	"ai_detection_t",
      	"server_name":	"voxl-tflite-server",
      	"size_bytes":	16384,
      	"server_pid":	2910
      }
      

      Okay, so we can see here "type" : "ai_detection_t" which you may remember as the ai_detection_t struct from voxl-tflite-server. So instead, you need to modify that pipe_is_type() function to have it check for "ai_detection_t" instead of "text". You could, also, just delete the line as it's just a safety check. But better to be safe!!

      Now that should fix your immediate issue. The final piece of the puzzle, here, will be creating a callback function and registering your client to it. I'm not a libmodal-pipe expert but I think the way we do it in the example code will work for you. The simple callback that's defined there just passes raw bytes of data as a char* and so what I think you'll want to do is typecast that data to type ai_detection_t*. I'm going to double check this sometime today. But then you'll have a struct of type ai_detection_t and you can access the member variables to get what you're looking for. For right now, you should just copy-paste the ai_detection_t struct definition in your code so that your module will know what an ai_detection_t is. In the future we'll expose this header in /usr/include.

      Hope this helps!!

      Thomas Patton
      thomas.patton@modalai.com

      1 Reply Last reply
      0
      • S sansoy

        @thomas Thanks Thomas! will get back to you....i'm sure!!

        S Offline
        S Offline
        sansoy
        Contributor
        wrote on last edited by
        #7

        @sansoy so i updated my copy named modal-tflite_data-client.c with fields listed in tflite_data/info
        {
        "name": "tflite_data",
        "location": "/run/mpa/tflite_data/",
        "type": "ai_detection_t",
        "server_name": "voxl-tflite-server",
        "size_bytes": 16384,
        "server_pid": 25994
        }

        Recompiled the script and ran
        voxl2:/run/mpa/tflite_data$ modal-tflite_data-client
        channel 0 connected to server
        sending tflite_data to server control pipe
        failed to send control command to server
        ERROR: control pipe not available

        but when i put a picture in front of it and the object detection is working i'm getting!

        voxl2:/run/mpa/tflite_data$ modal-tflite_data-client
        channel 0 connected to server
        sending tflite_data to server control pipe
        failed to send control command to server
        ERROR: control pipe not available
        received 172 bytes on channel 0: LXOV��O6
        received 172 bytes on channel 0: LXOV��F[6
        received 172 bytes on channel 0: LXOV7?_�6
        received 172 bytes on channel 0: LXOV! ��6
        received 172 bytes on channel 0: LXOV
        ���6
        received 172 bytes on channel 0: LXOV����6

        ? 1 Reply Last reply
        0
        • S sansoy

          @sansoy so i updated my copy named modal-tflite_data-client.c with fields listed in tflite_data/info
          {
          "name": "tflite_data",
          "location": "/run/mpa/tflite_data/",
          "type": "ai_detection_t",
          "server_name": "voxl-tflite-server",
          "size_bytes": 16384,
          "server_pid": 25994
          }

          Recompiled the script and ran
          voxl2:/run/mpa/tflite_data$ modal-tflite_data-client
          channel 0 connected to server
          sending tflite_data to server control pipe
          failed to send control command to server
          ERROR: control pipe not available

          but when i put a picture in front of it and the object detection is working i'm getting!

          voxl2:/run/mpa/tflite_data$ modal-tflite_data-client
          channel 0 connected to server
          sending tflite_data to server control pipe
          failed to send control command to server
          ERROR: control pipe not available
          received 172 bytes on channel 0: LXOV��O6
          received 172 bytes on channel 0: LXOV��F[6
          received 172 bytes on channel 0: LXOV7?_�6
          received 172 bytes on channel 0: LXOV! ��6
          received 172 bytes on channel 0: LXOV
          ���6
          received 172 bytes on channel 0: LXOV����6

          ? Offline
          ? Offline
          A Former User
          wrote on last edited by
          #8

          @sansoy

          Sweet, you should be able then to cast the char* data coming into your callback function into type ai_detection_t* and then access the member variables for x/y min/max for the boxes.

          Thomas Patton

          S 3 Replies Last reply
          0
          • ? A Former User

            @sansoy

            Sweet, you should be able then to cast the char* data coming into your callback function into type ai_detection_t* and then access the member variables for x/y min/max for the boxes.

            Thomas Patton

            S Offline
            S Offline
            sansoy
            Contributor
            wrote on last edited by
            #9

            @thomas so i included ai_detection.h and cast the char* data variable and compiled successfully and several of my services died ...lol

            Service Name | Enabled | Running | CPU Usage

            docker-autorun | Disabled | Not Running |
            modallink-relink | Disabled | Not Running |
            voxl-camera-server | Enabled | Not Running |
            voxl-cpu-monitor | Enabled | Not Running |
            voxl-dfs-server | Disabled | Not Running |
            voxl-feature-tracker | Disabled | Not Running |
            voxl-flow-server | Disabled | Not Running |

            I've tried everything to restart both camera server and cpu monitor and no luck. Rebooted, Cycled Power,
            Any thoughts on how to recover from this?

            1 Reply Last reply
            0
            • ? A Former User

              @sansoy

              Sweet, you should be able then to cast the char* data coming into your callback function into type ai_detection_t* and then access the member variables for x/y min/max for the boxes.

              Thomas Patton

              S Offline
              S Offline
              sansoy
              Contributor
              wrote on last edited by
              #10

              @thomas from my syslog

              Jan 23 00:46:51 m0054 voxl-camera-server[4202]: /usr/bin/voxl-camera-server: symbol lookup error: /usr/bin/voxl-camera-server: undefined symbol: pipe_validate_mavlin
              k_message_t
              Jan 23 00:46:51 m0054 systemd[1]: voxl-camera-server.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=127/n/a
              Jan 23 00:46:51 m0054 systemd[1]: voxl-camera-server.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
              Jan 23 00:46:51 m0054 voxl-px4[1656]: ERROR [muorb] SLPI: Failed to parse version request response packet!
              Jan 23 00:46:53 m0054 voxl-px4[1656]: message repeated 534 times: [ ERROR [muorb] SLPI: Failed to parse version request response packet!]
              Jan 23 00:46:53 m0054 systemd[1]: voxl-camera-server.service: Service hold-off time over, scheduling restart.
              Jan 23 00:46:53 m0054 systemd[1]: voxl-camera-server.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 1.
              Jan 23 00:46:53 m0054 systemd[1]: Stopped voxl-camera-server.
              Jan 23 00:46:53 m0054 systemd[1]: Started voxl-camera-server.
              Jan 23 00:46:53 m0054 voxl-camera-server[4226]: /usr/bin/voxl-camera-server: symbol lookup error: /usr/bin/voxl-camera-server: undefined symbol: pipe_validate_mavlin
              k_message_t
              Jan 23 00:46:53 m0054 systemd[1]: voxl-camera-server.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=127/n/a
              Jan 23 00:46:53 m0054 systemd[1]: voxl-camera-server.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
              Jan 23 00:46:53 m0054 voxl-px4[1656]: ERROR [muorb] SLPI: Failed to parse version request response packet!

              Actually several enabled services wont restart
              Service Name | Enabled | Running | CPU Usage

              docker-autorun | Disabled | Not Running |
              modallink-relink | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-camera-server | Enabled | Not Running |
              voxl-cpu-monitor | Enabled | Not Running |
              voxl-dfs-server | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-feature-tracker | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-flow-server | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-imu-server | Enabled | Running | 0.0%
              voxl-lepton-server | Enabled | Not Running |
              voxl-mavcam-manager | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-mavlink-server | Enabled | Not Running |
              voxl-modem | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-neopixel-manager | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-portal | Enabled | Not Running |
              voxl-px4-imu-server | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-px4 | Enabled | Running | 32.9%
              voxl-qvio-server | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-rangefinder-server | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-remote-id | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-softap | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-static-ip | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-stitcher | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-streamer | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-tag-detector | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-tflite-server | Enabled | Running | 0.8%
              voxl-time-sync | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-uvc-server | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-vision-hub | Enabled | Not Running |
              voxl-wait-for-fs | Enabled | Completed |
              voxl-wfb-rx-video | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-wfb-rx | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-wfb-tx-video | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl-wfb-tx | Disabled | Not Running |
              voxl2:/$

              all i did was compile and make install my modal-tflite_data-client.c file

              1 Reply Last reply
              0
              • ? A Former User

                @sansoy

                Sweet, you should be able then to cast the char* data coming into your callback function into type ai_detection_t* and then access the member variables for x/y min/max for the boxes.

                Thomas Patton

                S Offline
                S Offline
                sansoy
                Contributor
                wrote on last edited by
                #11

                @thomas its all working now.

                had to reinstall the latest sdk. I'm guessing make install is a no-no. so just did a make and ran the executable.

                voxl2:/libmodal-pipe/build/examples(master)$ ./modal-tflite_data-client
                channel 0 connected to server
                Bounding Box Coordinates:
                score: 0.558105, x_min: 406.000000, y_min: 417.000000, x_max: 535.000000, y_max: 472.000000
                Bounding Box Coordinates:
                score: 0.429199, x_min: 427.000000, y_min: 370.000000, x_max: 573.000000, y_max: 426.000000
                Bounding Box Coordinates:
                score: 0.617676, x_min: 498.000000, y_min: 300.000000, x_max: 655.000000, y_max: 358.000000
                Bounding Box Coordinates:
                score: 0.416748, x_min: 505.000000, y_min: 302.000000, x_max: 659.000000, y_max: 359.000000
                Bounding Box Coordinates:
                score: 0.739258, x_min: 506.000000, y_min: 304.000000, x_max: 667.000000, y_max: 364.000000
                Bounding Box Coordinates:
                score: 0.493652, x_min: 4.000000, y_min: -1.000000, x_max: 781.000000, y_max: 109.000000
                Bounding Box Coordinates:
                score: 0.547852, x_min: 509.000000, y_min: 306.000000, x_max: 664.000000, y_max: 363.000000
                Bounding Box Coordinates:
                score: 0.640625, x_min: 505.000000, y_min: 310.000000, x_max: 660.000000, y_max: 369.000000

                ? 1 Reply Last reply
                0
                • S sansoy

                  @thomas its all working now.

                  had to reinstall the latest sdk. I'm guessing make install is a no-no. so just did a make and ran the executable.

                  voxl2:/libmodal-pipe/build/examples(master)$ ./modal-tflite_data-client
                  channel 0 connected to server
                  Bounding Box Coordinates:
                  score: 0.558105, x_min: 406.000000, y_min: 417.000000, x_max: 535.000000, y_max: 472.000000
                  Bounding Box Coordinates:
                  score: 0.429199, x_min: 427.000000, y_min: 370.000000, x_max: 573.000000, y_max: 426.000000
                  Bounding Box Coordinates:
                  score: 0.617676, x_min: 498.000000, y_min: 300.000000, x_max: 655.000000, y_max: 358.000000
                  Bounding Box Coordinates:
                  score: 0.416748, x_min: 505.000000, y_min: 302.000000, x_max: 659.000000, y_max: 359.000000
                  Bounding Box Coordinates:
                  score: 0.739258, x_min: 506.000000, y_min: 304.000000, x_max: 667.000000, y_max: 364.000000
                  Bounding Box Coordinates:
                  score: 0.493652, x_min: 4.000000, y_min: -1.000000, x_max: 781.000000, y_max: 109.000000
                  Bounding Box Coordinates:
                  score: 0.547852, x_min: 509.000000, y_min: 306.000000, x_max: 664.000000, y_max: 363.000000
                  Bounding Box Coordinates:
                  score: 0.640625, x_min: 505.000000, y_min: 310.000000, x_max: 660.000000, y_max: 369.000000

                  ? Offline
                  ? Offline
                  A Former User
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #12

                  @sansoy

                  Amazing, glad you got it working!!

                  Thomas

                  S 1 Reply Last reply
                  0
                  • ? A Former User

                    @sansoy

                    Amazing, glad you got it working!!

                    Thomas

                    S Offline
                    S Offline
                    sansoy
                    Contributor
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #13

                    @thomas Hey thomas, we've got the handshaking between your C helper program and our python script working well. i successfully loaded Yolov8 on the voxl and it works really well on images. Was wondering if we could open the camera pipe the same as the tflite_data pipe to run inference on the frames in realtime. i noticed in your /data/web_root/index.html that you are using websockets for serving the videos in the browsers. is this the better route?

                    ? 1 Reply Last reply
                    0
                    • S sansoy

                      @thomas Hey thomas, we've got the handshaking between your C helper program and our python script working well. i successfully loaded Yolov8 on the voxl and it works really well on images. Was wondering if we could open the camera pipe the same as the tflite_data pipe to run inference on the frames in realtime. i noticed in your /data/web_root/index.html that you are using websockets for serving the videos in the browsers. is this the better route?

                      ? Offline
                      ? Offline
                      A Former User
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #14

                      @sansoy

                      When you say "open the camera pipe" I'm not fully sure I understand what you mean. voxl-tflite-server in its current state already opens up a camera pipe for input images and then publishes its predictions out in that tflite_data pipe and so if you're asking if that's possible then absolutely. Or are you trying to make an output image pipe or something with the predictions overlayed or something?

                      Sorry, just not fully sure what you're asking.

                      Thomas Patton

                      S 1 Reply Last reply
                      0
                      • ? A Former User

                        @sansoy

                        When you say "open the camera pipe" I'm not fully sure I understand what you mean. voxl-tflite-server in its current state already opens up a camera pipe for input images and then publishes its predictions out in that tflite_data pipe and so if you're asking if that's possible then absolutely. Or are you trying to make an output image pipe or something with the predictions overlayed or something?

                        Sorry, just not fully sure what you're asking.

                        Thomas Patton

                        S Offline
                        S Offline
                        sansoy
                        Contributor
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #15

                        @thomas i'm not using voxl-tflite-server. On my voxl2 i installed the latest version of YOLOv8 from Ultralytics https://docs.ultralytics.com/ and it works well when i run inference on local images. i wanted to test just using a local python script that streams video frames from the hires_small_color camera and runs inference.

                        ? 1 Reply Last reply
                        0
                        • S sansoy

                          @thomas i'm not using voxl-tflite-server. On my voxl2 i installed the latest version of YOLOv8 from Ultralytics https://docs.ultralytics.com/ and it works well when i run inference on local images. i wanted to test just using a local python script that streams video frames from the hires_small_color camera and runs inference.

                          ? Offline
                          ? Offline
                          A Former User
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #16

                          @sansoy

                          Oh ok I see what you're going for then. However we don't currently have an API for doing streaming video in Python, only C++ through libmodal-pipe like we do in modules like voxl-tflite-server.

                          If you really want to use Python, you could write a small C++ helper program to take in images from the camera and then use some sort of event-driven framework to pass those images to your Python script. Perhaps you could do something clever with just writing them to a temporary directory and setting up a callback-based interface in Python to detect when new files are present.

                          Sorry for the indirect answer, hope this at least helps some!!

                          Thomas Patton

                          S 1 Reply Last reply
                          0
                          • ? A Former User

                            @sansoy

                            Oh ok I see what you're going for then. However we don't currently have an API for doing streaming video in Python, only C++ through libmodal-pipe like we do in modules like voxl-tflite-server.

                            If you really want to use Python, you could write a small C++ helper program to take in images from the camera and then use some sort of event-driven framework to pass those images to your Python script. Perhaps you could do something clever with just writing them to a temporary directory and setting up a callback-based interface in Python to detect when new files are present.

                            Sorry for the indirect answer, hope this at least helps some!!

                            Thomas Patton

                            S Offline
                            S Offline
                            sansoy
                            Contributor
                            wrote on last edited by
                            #17

                            @thomas I already wrote a c helper function that uses libmodal-pipe to pipe tflite_data that my python script reads in realtime. it works well
                            per your message " small C++ helper program to take in images from the camera". how would i modify my c helper to use libmodal-pipe to stream data from one of the cameras?

                            ? 1 Reply Last reply
                            0
                            • S sansoy

                              @thomas I already wrote a c helper function that uses libmodal-pipe to pipe tflite_data that my python script reads in realtime. it works well
                              per your message " small C++ helper program to take in images from the camera". how would i modify my c helper to use libmodal-pipe to stream data from one of the cameras?

                              ? Offline
                              ? Offline
                              A Former User
                              wrote on last edited by
                              #18

                              @sansoy

                              Oh great, if you already have a function that works with libmodal-pipe then you shouldn't have much trouble writing one for the cameras. Take a look at these lines for the initial code to register the callback function to the camera pipe, this sets up _camera_helper_cb to receive images on callback. For an example of parsing that data, maybe check out these lines in a different module. There's a bit of extra info here but this shows the gist of casting the raw char* bytes into something like an OpenCV image. Definitely modify as needed to fit your use case!

                              Keep me posted, happy to help however I can!

                              Thomas Patton

                              1 Reply Last reply
                              0

                              Hello! It looks like you're interested in this conversation, but you don't have an account yet.

                              Getting fed up of having to scroll through the same posts each visit? When you register for an account, you'll always come back to exactly where you were before, and choose to be notified of new replies (either via email, or push notification). You'll also be able to save bookmarks and upvote posts to show your appreciation to other community members.

                              With your input, this post could be even better 💗

                              Register Login
                              Reply
                              • Reply as topic
                              Log in to reply
                              • Oldest to Newest
                              • Newest to Oldest
                              • Most Votes


                              ModalAI
                              Categories Recent Tags ModalAI.com Docs
                              © 2026 ModalAI® · Accelerating autonomy for smaller, smarter, safer drones · Powered by NodeBB
                              • Login

                              • Don't have an account? Register

                              • Login or register to search.
                              • First post
                                Last post
                              0
                              • Categories
                              • Recent
                              • Tags
                              • Popular
                              • Users
                              • Groups