This question may be particular interest to @rmackay9 and @SIYI
A question came up recently about the ability of SIYI gimbal cameras to geotag images in the image EXIF when they are taken.
As far as I know, the only way to geotag images taken with a SIYI gimbal camera is to use the geo-tag utility in Mission Planner.
For a mavlink controlled camera to record the geotag data in the EXIF of the image, the mavlink message sent to the camera would have to also contain the geolocation data.
It’s possible for EXIF data to also contain roll, pitch and heading data - and Mission Planner geo-tag utility has this data available.
As reference - drones such DJI products contain all this geotag data - and the EXIF fields that it uses are an extension to the standard EXIF fields.
I was given a link to a MP4 file uploaded google drive that appears to show the Siyi A8 mini achieving geotag data in the EXIF when a picture is captured.
There’s no sound (not that I can speak Chinese) and the messages displayed aren’t very informative.
It would be helpful to know if ArduPilot sends geolocation data to a camera along with the Mavlink message to take a photo. If it does, then I’ll do some testing with my Siyi A8.
Thanks!
ADDENDUM:
If a camera were to be “listening” to the Mavlink data stream, a camera could simply use the most recent Mavlink geo-locatation broadcast to geotag an image in the EXIF. I don’t think it would be very accurate - but it might be better than nothing. And I don’t know if a SIYI gimbal/camera has the ability to listen to the entire Mavlink data stream - or only gets the Mavlink messages that are directed to it through the UART it uses - and is defined in ArduPilot for this purpose.
Yes, as long as the Siyi camera is setup according to the AP wiki it should be using the Siyi serial protocol and AP sends the vehicle’s location and attitude to the camera gimbal and with recent versions of the Siyi camera gimbal firmware, images on the SD Card have the correct EXIF location data. Sadly they don’t include the vehicle’s heading so I normally force the vehicle to be facing North.
P.S. I think perhaps the Siyi setup docs also include instructions for using a MAVLink interface but we strongly recommend following the AP setup instructions which uses the Siyi serial interface.
It will be interesting to see how much delay occurs between the Mavlink shutter command and the actual exposure.
With my Sony cameras at about 7 meters per second, I recall seeing a position error of a few feet. (Hence the need for RTK)
In fact, using the Hot Shoe to log the geolocation data, this is improved considerably - even without RTK.
Maybe @SIYI can add this to potential future projects. Interestingly, the FoxTech Map02 which uses the Sony a5100 “internals” provides a “hot shoe” lead, even though the Sony a5100 doesn’t have a hot-shoe. So maybe @SIYI can engineer something. It would certainly be competition with the DJI drones offering RTK.
We are currently working with ADTi to integrate their powerful mapping camera series with SIYI ecosystem, stay tuned!
And we already got some progresses