Best posts made by alfa budiman

I'm not sure if you still have this problem, but if you know ROS, you can stream the cameras on your computer by configuring the drone to have the ROS master on your computer. First follow the steps at this link to setup ROS on RB5. https://docs.modalai.com/setup-ros-on-voxl-2/

Then you can set the ROS master to be on your computer by opening ~/.bashrc on the RB5 drone, and entering these lines in the file:

export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://{PC_IP_ADDRESS}:11311/
export ROS_HOSTNAME={RB5_DRONE_IP}

PC_IP_ADDRESS can be obtained from ipconfig on your computer. RB5_DRONE_IP is the one you use to ssh into it.
Then on the drone:

source ~/.bashrc

On your computer execute:

roscore
Rviz

On the drone execute:

roslaunch voxl_mpa_to_ros voxl_mpa_to_ros.launch

You will then be able to view the camera display topics from voxl_mpa_to_ros on your computer. You can stream them on Rviz, and you can create ROS nodes to subscribe to these topics for whatever computer vision application you develop. Hope this helps.

I'd like to share my experience installing these packages on the RB5 drone. It was not pleasant but it got done.

I tried several variations of pip install opencv-python, with different versions of opencv and pip / pip2 / pip3, none of those worked. I tried sudo apt install and that didn't work. Similar issues popped up trying CV Bridge.

Ultimately, I ended up having to build these packages from source (I think that's the right term). I followed the steps here: https://pyimagesearch.com/2015/06/22/install-opencv-3-0-and-python-2-7-on-ubuntu/
to install opencv. I ignored steps 8 and 9.

To install CV Bridge, first I installed opencv as per the linked instructions. Then, I repeated the linked instructions step 10 but with the github repo for CV Bridge (https://github.com/ros-perception/vision_opencv). After this, you must edit the ~/.bashrc on the drone and enter the following:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib

These packages can then be used for computer vision work with camera imagery from voxl_mpa_to_ros_node. If anyone was able to install these packages using just pip install, I'd like to know how, as I believe this issue, of having to install from source may pop up in other packages I try to install on the drone.