hikrobotcamlib 1.2.0

Package HIK Robotics camera drivers and some helpers

Package HIK Robotics camera drivers and a Pythonic wrappers to the data. You still need to install the SDK to get the drivers/libraries.

This supports a subset of the platforms HIKRobotics’ supports:

• Linux: glibc (not MUSL, ie not Alpine) x86_64, aarch64 and armhf (probably, only tested on aarch64)

• MacOS (idk if the dynlibs from vendor are both for Apple silicon and x86_64 but at least x86_64 works)

I’ve tried to make nice wrappers that should mostly handle things cleanly but this uses ctypes and calls external libraries that are not real Python bindings (via cddl). One wrong move and everything crashes hard.

Usage

The wrappers are documented and type-hinted, enjoy. TLDR:

from typing import Optional
import time

from hikrobotcamlib Camera, DeviceList, Frame, DeviceTransport

def frame_callback(frame: Frame, cam: Camera) -> None:
    """Handle frames from camera"""
    # TODO: Do something with the frame

cam: Optional[Camera] = None
for devinfo in DeviceList(DeviceTransport.GIGE | DeviceTransport.USB):
    cam = Camera(devinfo)
    break

if not cam:
    raise RuntimeError("No camera")

cam.open()
cam.frame_callback = frame_callback
cam.trigger_enable(False)
cam.set_framerate(10.0)
cam.start()
time.sleep(2.5)
cam.stop()
cam.close()

Docker

For more controlled deployments and to get rid of “works on my computer” -syndrome, we always make sure our software works under docker.

It’s also a quick way to get started with a standard development environment.

SSH agent forwarding

We need buildkit:

export DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1

And also the exact way for forwarding agent to running instance is different on OSX:

export DOCKER_SSHAGENT="-v /run/host-services/ssh-auth.sock:/run/host-services/ssh-auth.sock -e SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/run/host-services/ssh-auth.sock"

and Linux:

export DOCKER_SSHAGENT="-v $SSH_AUTH_SOCK:$SSH_AUTH_SOCK -e SSH_AUTH_SOCK"

Creating a development container

Build image, create container and start it:

docker build --ssh default --target devel_shell -t hikrobotcamlib:devel_shell .
docker create --name hikrobotcamlib_devel -v `pwd`":/app" -it `echo $DOCKER_SSHAGENT` hikrobotcamlib:devel_shell
docker start -i hikrobotcamlib_devel

pre-commit considerations

If working in Docker instead of native env you need to run the pre-commit checks in docker too:

docker exec -i hikrobotcamlib_devel /bin/bash -c "pre-commit install"
docker exec -i hikrobotcamlib_devel /bin/bash -c "pre-commit run --all-files"

You need to have the container running, see above. Or alternatively use the docker run syntax but using the running container is faster:

docker run --rm -it -v `pwd`":/app" hikrobotcamlib:devel_shell -c "pre-commit run --all-files"

Test suite

You can use the devel shell to run py.test when doing development, for CI use the “tox” target in the Dockerfile:

docker build --ssh default --target tox -t hikrobotcamlib:tox .
docker run --rm -it -v `pwd`":/app" `echo $DOCKER_SSHAGENT` hikrobotcamlib:tox

Production docker

TODO: Remove this section if this is a library and not an application

There’s a “production” target as well for running the application, remember to change that architecture tag to arm64 if building on ARM:

docker build --ssh default --target production -t hikrobotcamlib:amd64-latest .
docker run --rm --network host -it --name hikrobotcamlib hikrobotcamlib:amd64-latest

Development

TODO: Remove the repo init from this document after you have done it.

TLDR:

• Create and activate a Python 3.11 virtualenv (assuming virtualenvwrapper):

  mkvirtualenv -p `which python3.11` my_virtualenv

• change to a branch:

  git checkout -b my_branch

• install Poetry: https://python-poetry.org/docs/#installation

• Install project deps and pre-commit hooks:

  poetry install
  pre-commit install
  pre-commit run --all-files

• Ready to go.

Remember to activate your virtualenv whenever working on the repo, this is needed because pylint and mypy pre-commit hooks use the “system” python for now (because reasons).