(Almost) taking snapshots over telnet on a Parrot Jumping Sumo

As part of the my attempts to set up inductive charging on a Parrot Jumping Sumo I am looking at some form of "docking" control where when the robot is close to the charging station it attempts to self-dock, using the camera and some sort of marker on the charging station.

To do this I'm going to need to access the video feed and before I go down the path of setting up the full Parrot SDK I thought I'd have a poke around the Sumo's Linux OS internals.

It turns out that the Sumo has yavta - aka "Yet Another V4L2 Test Application".

So, after telnetting to the Sumo on 192.168.2.1 I first needed to stop the Sumo process that was accessing the camera (disclaimer, this is the process that does "everything" that makes the Sumo work with your phone so you'll need to reboot to restore normal functionality):

kill `pidof dragon-prog`

Then I was able to take a snapshot using yavta:

yavta --capture=1 --file=/data/ftp/image.jpeg /dev/video0

To grab that image I simple FTP'd it from 192.168.2.1 - it's waiting in the root of the FTP file tree.

There's only one (not unsolvable, I hope) problem though - the frame wasn't fully captured so only the top couple of rows of pixels had valid data...