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    • #11447
      Michel Castaño
      Keymaster

      The camera accessory connects to the Syrus via the serial port and can take photos of low, medium and high resolutions.  Syrus gives you the ability to take photos when important events occur, such as – Panic button pressed, Door Opened (input activated), Aggressive Driving detected, Hard braking, Idling, and more.

      Serial Camera device allows to take photos with different resolutions (160×128, 320×240 and 640×480):

      160×128 (Low Resolution) Up to 240 photos* could be stored in S3 memory.

      320×240 (Medium Resolution) Up to 160 photos* could be stored in S3 memory.

      640×480 (High Resolution) Up to 80 photos* could be stored in S3 memory.

      *Remember that Syrus 3 memory is shared with events buffer so number of pictures here is the maximum possible.

      Serial Camera is powered with 12 volts and connected via serial port at 115200 bps 8n1. The firmware of DCT’s serial camera is adapted specially to work with Syrus, reason why not any serial camera can be used.

      Remember Syrus Serial camera can be used freely in Pegasus with a simple managed configuration (you must ask support@digitalcomtech.com to add this managed configuration to your Pegasus), or can be used outside Pegasus as a plugin.

      How it works

      – Syrus is set up in Photocam mode through its configuration. This is an special setup for serial port in which Syrus stops the console mode via Serial port and starts an special protocol to communicate with Photocams.

      – Syrus is also configured to take pictures through Photocam, meaning that an event as well as an input activation, an speed threshold trespassed or even a user flag enabled can be used to generate the photo shoot order to serial camera.

      – Once a condition set up in the Syrus’ configuration to take a picture is accomplished, Syrus send a command to serial camera to take one picture. Camera buffer supports up to one picture, so if a second request of a picture is activated into Syrus, it is going to wait until the pending picture finishes to be taken and is being sent.

      – Photocam sends the picture taken to Syrus through its Rx port divided in packets. Each packet is received by Syrus and then verified by Checksum to reassemble the image. If checksum results in error the packet is requested again to serial camera. Once serial camera finishes the picture sending, it is ready to receive a new request.

      – If for some reason the picture cannot be taken (for example an electrical failure on Photocam), or if the Syrus buffer is full it is going to result in a notification which must be handled by server.

      – When the picture is complete inside Syrus, it is either stored in buffer if there are no communication with ftp server, or it is sent to the server. Depending on Network (2G or 3G), size, and Signal strength, A picture could delay between a couple of seconds to even minutes to be sent to FTP port.

      – Up to three cameras can be connected simultaneously to a Syrus through a Serial Expander.

      The following flowchart resumes the logic explained above:

      Setting Up Syrus

      Syrus needs to be set in the Serial Camera communication mode using the XASC message. As explained before, in this mode the Syrus serial console will be disabled and it will not accept any configuration messages via the serial port. The configuration messages can still be sent over the air to Syrus. To exit the Serial Camera mode via the serial port a special escaping message has to be sent. The escaping message is “EXIT_COMMDATA” and must be sent as a single packet using a communication software like Hyperterminal. It is also possible to disable the Serial Camera mode over the air with the XASC configuration message.

      1. Configure Syrus in Photocam mode. For this example lets enable the camera mode 2 using resolution 2 and send the unsolicited messages to DP00 with :

      >SXASCM202<

      2. After wiring according to the diagram at the beginning of this document, send the following command to check if camera is well connected and ready:

      >QXASCD<

      The response could be something like this:

      >RXASCS0002<

      Where valid values are:
      00: Serial camera ready.
      02: Syrus is receiving photo from the camera. This can take several seconds depending on the photo’s size. During this state it is not possible to capture a new photo.
      03: Sending photo to the FTP server.
      04: Photo was successfully sent to the FTP server. The G17 signal is momentarily true when this state is reached.

      If 05 appears double check connections.

      Further details of this command in the manual, XASCD configuration message

       

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