mini Argus station
Designed by Shawn Harrison and Gerry Hatcher, USGS
Contact: [email protected]
This station design was inspired by a talk by John Stanley at the 2016 Argus workshop on how to make a low-cost, high-quality Argus system.
Cameras: (2) Point Grey Blackfly 5MP GigE (BFLY-PGE-50S5C-C)
Lenses: Fujinon HF12XA-5M and Fujinon HF8XA-5M
Controller: Odroid-XU4 running Ubuntu Mate 16.04 (OS on 64GB eMMC chip and data archive on 1TB SSD external drive)
LAN Hub: Netgear Prosafe GS105 5-port GigE hub
Power: 12VDC lead-acid battery with 5VDC step-down converter to Odroid (connected to battery tender or solar controller and 80W panel(s))
Network: Verizon 4G with static IP, Cradlepoint IBR600B modem/router
Control relay for power cycling, I like the X-410 from Xytronix (ControlByWeb)
Camera housings: APG 24C-AH with 7” and 8.5” barrels
cables: ethernet, usb3.0, power
misc. hardware for mounting structure
The cameras+lenses are each housed in a weatherproof housing entered by two cables: a GPIO power cable and a cat6 ethernet cable. The guts of the system are housed in a separate weatherproof box which can be mounted several meters from the cameras. The cameras are both controlled by a single Odroid XU4 running Ubuntu Mate linux. John Stanley’s Argus demon “hotm” is used to manage the camera settings, video streams, image capture and processing images into image products and stacks. Dumps, products and stacks are stored on the data archive, while products and stacks are transferred to the office via rsync over ssh. The office computer automatically rectifies, merges, feature detects, processes stacks (e.g. cBathy), etc using matlab and task scheduler.
The first installation of this build was established on the roof of a hotel in Santa Cruz, CA Santa Cruz, Dream Inn and then adapted to run on solar power at Sunset State Beach, CA. Full frame video data are collected at 2 Hz for 10 minutes every half-hour during daylight hours for Argus image products, and 20 minutes hourly for pixel instruments (i.e. for wave run-up, vBar, and cBathy stacks).
The Point Grey BFLY-50S5C-C camera with Fujinon compact form lens in an APG 24C housing with pan/tilt mount was the most compact and fully weather proof camera/enclosure combination that I could find to fit my application:
Following John Stanley's advice and using the station design tool in Support-Routines, I chose these Fujinon lenses - an 8mm lens for the offshore view and a 12mm for alongshore:
To control the cameras, I chose to use the Odroid XU4 by HardKernel - a 32bit 8-core 2GHz ARM based single-board computer running Ubuntu 16.04. It has two USB3 ports and a GigE port, perfect for a camera station. I modified the Odroid with a Homonoid case to help with heat management. We initially thought that we'd need to use a single odroid for each camera included at the station, but I've been able to run two 5mp cameras with 1 odroid without dropping many frames. John Stanley's Argus3.2 code 'hotm' is used to control the camera streams (calling registers in the FlyCapture2 API), take photos, collect image products, and gather timestacks.
The entire station is powered by 12VDC, using a sealed-lead-acid battery charged either by battery tender connected to AC or solar panels. The cameras, modem/router, ethernet switch, and WebRelay all use 12VDC input. The Odroid uses 5VDC, so I included a voltage step-down converter in the system:
The control contents were all stuffed into a small weatherproof box and mounted to DIN rail for easy field access/replacement. A single cable gland was added to the box to pass 2 ethernet cables, power in, and 2 gpio cables. A passive heat sink was added to the box to remove heat generate by the computer/modem: an aluminum slug with rubber o-ring maintain seal while allowing heat to escape and dissipate from the heat-sink fins in the California breeze.
Solar shades for the camera enclosures and control box were made by cutting and bending thin aluminum sheet scraps and seem to work well.
The fully installed stations look like this:
Dream Inn:
and Sunset:
Oblique Timex:
Rectified Timex:
Runup:
vBar:
