ToF v2 keeps crashing because of high temperature

Alex Kushleyev

@msberk , ok so you are not seeing exposure being reported.. You should double check that you are using the version of camera server that supports this feature:

https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/services/voxl-camera-server/-/blob/dev/src/hal3_camera_mgr.cpp?ref_type=heads#L614

(you should be able to see this print if you run voxl-camera-server -d 0)

In the following lines of code, the sensor temperature and exposure is read back and printed :

https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/services/voxl-camera-server/-/blob/dev/src/hal3_camera_mgr.cpp?ref_type=heads#L1861

The exposure value should also be send with the tof data IRMeta.exposure_ns.

So if you run your voxl-camera-server -d 0 now and grep for TOF exp, if you don't see anything, it means you are not using the right version of camera server.

If you correctly set the exposure to 2000us in 5FPS mode, the sensor should feel much cooler to the touch, it should never overheat. You could even try going lower to 1000us exposure for testing.

Alex

Alex Kushleyev

OK, never mind, i guess you do see the exposure value show up in voxl-portal, so that is a good sign!

You could enable debug prints and see what the temperature of the sensors is reporting.

Also, can you please clarify where you are connecting 5V ?

msberk

@Alex-Kushleyev Ah, right, sorry. 5V going to the power wires of the two ToF sensors.

Alex Kushleyev

@msberk , thanks. Also, can you please clarify what adapter board you have plugged into the TOF2 sensor. Is it in this configuration ? https://docs.modalai.com/M0171/

msberk

@Alex-Kushleyev It is M0169, we have yet to see M0171 go up for sale on the store or beta store, but would love some since the wire interface is clunky.

Alex Kushleyev

@msberk, OK, M0169 is fine and 5V input there is ok too.

So, after you were able to lower the exposure value, did you feel a noticeable temperature drop of the sensor? what if you set the limit to 1000us, does it overheat (that should be very unlikely).

Printing out the temperature should be helpful, if you want to change that debug print to regular print, so that you don't have all the other debug messages scrolling, that will be easy to see..

Alex

msberk

@Alex-Kushleyev It seems to be behaving at present. I picked 2000us since it seemed to give similar performance to the previous sensor. I'm going to try installing the "regular" 1.9.4 with the updated ae_msv setting and run that debug/grep again and make sure the setting is being respected. If so I may be ok, and just had something weird happen earlier since it was running on the bench for a while. What do y'all run on the starling 2 for max exposure? 6000 seemed practically unusable unless very actively cooled and we toasted a couple of these seemingly irrecoverably at that setting when we had them in the enclosure like the old sensors.

Edit: running with default 1.9.4 and the correct settings in conf and it seems to respect 2000us limit. Also, to answer your temp question yes going from 6000 to 2000 made a huge difference in qualitative temperatures.

Alex Kushleyev

@msberk , OK, please do more testing at 2000us and keep an eye on the temperature. By the way, the TOF v1 had max phase exposure of 1.2ms, so even 2ms for TOF V2 will give you better performance than TOF V1.

On Starling 2 there is a heat spreader that helps dissipate the heat.

I believe there is a limit of 95C, if the sensor gets to that point, it will turn itself off.

Alex

msberk

@Alex-Kushleyev Thanks so much for your help. If 1200us was the V1 level we may just set it to that and move forward, making something that works at the previous level with minimal surgery to the drone is our shortest path to success at the moment.

msberk

@Alex-Kushleyev just learned you cannot set the exposure max to 1200. 1000 and 1500 work. If you set it to 1200 you get a vague IO error

ERROR:   [ERROR] in _sensor_ioctl, ioctl failed: Connection timed out
ERROR:   [ERROR] in voxl_cci_read, Failed ioctl call
ERROR:   Failed CCI read

Just posting this here as an FYI to other wrestling with these new sensors.

Alex Kushleyev

@msberk , one more thing, there was a recent change that bumped the default fps from 5 to 10, so if you were testing that and reduce the exposure time to 2000us, but the FPS was at 10hz instead of 5Hz, the power dissipation was double of what you intended. The exposure (up to 6000us) is specified per illuminated phase. There are 8 illuminated phases per frame in medium and long range TOF V2 modes. Perhaps this caused your overheating issues after you changed exposure to 2000 us but did not notice that the FPS increased to 10Hz.

I am going to share some more information about how the different modes, exposures and FPS relate to the power usage, but long story short, here is the take-away:

if you have 5fps with 2000us exposure per phase (total 16ms exposure per frame), so that is 80ms of total exposure (active IR) time per second
then for 10fps, 2000us exposure per phase ... 160ms of total exposure time (active IR) per second, double the power consumption / dissipation.

here is the commit with the change 5fps to 10
https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/services/voxl-camera-server/-/commit/919c24bef21cbea2eb7be33853884f5f606a0763

another commit that removes the need for setting lme_msv for TOF to use the exposure_max_us
https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/services/voxl-camera-server/-/commit/0f195e2cbbe9cd4329d178ff42aa6f5fdf5e9307

Alex

Alex Kushleyev

@msberk ,

We added a section to documentation that explains the power consumption of the TOF V2 sensor. As you will see, it depends on the operating conditions. Please review the details and you can use this to experiment with parameters and find something that works well for you.

https://docs.modalai.com/M0171/#power-consumption

If something is not clear in that documentation, please let me know.

Alex

msberk

@Alex-Kushleyev Thanks! This is helpful. Definitely easier to overheat these than the last gen so good to have the specs on it.