Total control of Sony A7RM4

ArduCopter Copter 4.3
1

We use a 25kg quad to acquire photovoltaic panel serials on big plants. We really needed total control of the camera to adjust to light changes in real time. So i took the plunge and started working on sony sdk on a raspberry. I finally finished implementing it, i have total control of all the parameters the sdk offers for my A7RM4 and realtime video. Not bad :slight_smile:
In the picture the camera is streaming udp video to my pc trough ethernet, superimposed on the image some of the parameters updated in realtime.
At the moment the following cameras are supported:

  • ILCE-1, ILCE-9M2, ILCE-7RM5, ILCE-7RM4A, ILCE-7RM4, ILCE-7SM3, ILCE-7M4, ILCE-7C
  • DSC-RX0M2 (Ver. 3.00 or later)
  • ILME-FX6V/ILME-FX6T(Ver. 3.00 or later), ILME-FX3(Ver. 2.00 or later), ILME-FX30

Sadly, my camera is the only one not supporting content management trough sdk, only remote operations. At the moment of writing (camera firmware 1.2 and sdk 1.07) there is gps photo tagging support on the sdk only for the new A7RM5, hopefully all the other cameras will receive it too trough a firmware update in near future.

The feature we needed the most was to understand if the camera was in focus and where on the frame was the focus, we reached both targets and it works really really well.

4 Likes
2

Good job, that code is tough.

UPDATE: i found it in the manual. the Number and string you can store in EXIF data is only available on the model 5. Image ID(String) CrDeviceProperty_ImageID_String and Image ID(Numerical Value) CrDeviceProperty_ImageID_Num

Where did you see that the A7RM5 supports on-camera metadata tagging?

is it referenced in the sample code for SDK 1.07 ?

for anyone wondering, we are talking about this Sony SDK

3

How are you controlling the camera? Natively through the ground station like QGC? Are you willing to share the code? I’m looking for the same solution but preferably using QGC native camera control.