Product Description

RidgeRun has more than 13 years of experience creating custom Linux V4L2 drivers for embedded systems. The customer selects the hardware sensor or chip and RidgeRun creates the V4L2 driver for it. This product covers the work required to create the V4L2 capture driver for your system, assuming no hardware issues and including support for one camera and one resolution. Others can be added as part of the engineering services.

V4L2 is the official Linux Kernel API to handle capture devices like camera sensors, video decoders or FPGAs feeding video frames to the SoC. The video frames can be component, composite, HDMI, SDI, or frames from other video encoding standards.

The V4L2 framework defines the API the Linux camera driver supports in order to be V4L2 compliant. The Linux kernel uses the camera driver to initialize the hardware and produce video frames. Each of these functions has a specific implication to the camera sensor. Often the driver interacts with the camera sensor, receiver chip or FPGA by reading and writing I2C or SPI registers.

Creating a Linux Camera Driver

Creating a Linux camera driver consists of the following, included in the price of the product:

Subdevice Driver
Camera sensor configuration via I2C, SPI or other low-level communication to initialize sensor and support different resolutions. RidgeRun custom drivers support one resolution. Others can be added as needed.

Device Tree Modification
Capture subsystem configuration and video node creation (dev/video):
In Jetson TX1/TX2/Xavier/Nano, this involves code needed to configure Video Input (VI) to receive the video coming from the camera. Support to capture from v4l2, libargus and nvcamerasrc (YUV).
In UltraScale+, this involves adding the code to configure the VPSS to receive the video coming from the sensor. It might require some work on the PL.
In DM8168 and DM8148, this is the VPSS configuration.
In i.MX6, this is the IPU configuration.
In DM368, this is the VPFE configuration.

Application Support:
Add support to one application like GStreamer, Yavta, etc., to grab the frames available in the video node (/dev/video). Sometimes this involves creating software patches to support custom color spaces.

Note: RidgeRun assumes that there are no hardware issues that would delay the development process (and increase costs). In case of problems with your hardware, RidgeRun will bill up to 20 hours of engineers services for the time needed to inform you of what is wrong. Driver delivery time is 3 to 4 weeks if it has to be created from scratch, upon receiving the hardware.

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Platforms Supported

Jetson TX1
Jetson TX2
Jetson Xavier
Jetson Nano
i.MX6, i.MX8
UltraScale+

NOTE: Additional platforms may be supported. Contact us for additional information.

License

CMOS Sensor or V4L2 driver