Images are turning up green

[ajarrell]

When we recovered the images from the still image package after the test flight, a majority of the images came back in green scale. Shortly after the package was turned on, the majority of the images were green tinted. Occasionally, the images were in true color, every 8-9 images randomly intermixed. Has anyone else had this issue? if so how was it resolved?  

[Austin MnSGC]

This is a common problem that we've been having for over a year now. So far as I know, we still don't have a definite solution to this issue. In our experience at Minnesota, the high resolution images tend to green out more often than the lower resolution images. Because the high resolution image is taken first, it has been suggested that maybe the camera needs more time to "warm up" before the picture is taken. However, I haven't been able to test this because we never get the green images during ground testing, only during flights.

You could try adding some delay between the creation of the camera object and the capture of the first image to see if that works.

[ajarrell]

Would you recommend putting this delay after the creation of the camera thread but before its execution in the loop function of the main class or when the camera is opened in the take_picture function of the camera class?

Also, has the package been tested in an environmental chamber to reproduce the error?

[Austin MnSGC]

I'm not sure which exact version of the software you're using, but do the delay immediately after the creation of the camera object. It should look something like this:
camera = picamera.PiCamera()
This should be in the TakePicture class's run method.

Just add a 1 second delay or something to give the camera an opportunity to prepare itself:

camera = picamera.PiCamera()
time.sleep(1)
We've never reproduced the error outside of a flight.

[jess]

Does the distributed PI-cam have night vision capabilities? If so, could the green images jut be those that were taken with night vision on? We've only ever had the problem in flight, so I was assuming it was some sort of setting.

[Skylar MSGC]

The cameras Do Not have night vision capability.  We think it is a issue where the camera takes a picture immediately after turning on.  Putting a delay before the image is captured may be a possible solution for this bug.

[jess]

Ok, that's good to know. Thanks for replying. We will update the delay time and see if that solves the issue.