Hi Luxonis team,

I’m deploying several OAK1-PoE cameras, each at 20 FPS with depthai version 2.29 compiled from source.

The challenge is startup frame phase:

  • When my c++ ros2 code boots the pipelines one after another, each sensor begins its 50 ms cadence at a different instant.

  • The resulting fixed offset varies between reboots—e.g. run #1: closest frames are ~7 ms apart, run #2: ~16 ms apart.

For calibration I need timestamps within ≤ 2–4 ms across all cameras, but I would like to avoid wiring the FSIN/M8 frame-sync connector if possible.

Questions

  1. Is there a way to force the startup for the camera streams to be within 2-4 ms of each other?

  2. If not, is there a way to reset / delay a sensor’s frame counter at runtime—e.g. a register poke—so I could phase-align each camera in software after PTP lock?

  3. If neither is available, is there other versions of depthai that can accomplish this with the OAK1 PoE cameras?

    Hi Igor
    Apologies for late reply. The devices need to be hardware synced to achieve the 4ms threshold. There is no other way to program the device to start streaming at the same time - when device is booted, the cameras will start producing frames immediately. You can't halt that as far as I am aware.

    Thanks,
    Jaka