camera-adapter

com.mbreissi.edgecommons.CameraAdapter is the EdgeCommons southbound image-capture adapter. It connects to many industrial cameras at once — ONVIF/RTSP network video cameras and GenICam machine-vision cameras (GigE Vision and USB3 Vision) — and captures still images on a schedule or on command. Each capture becomes a complete, checksum-verified file under a local output root, and the adapter announces it on the fleet’s Unified Namespace with the paths, digest, and metadata a consumer needs to find and trust it. Built on the edgecommons Rust library, it runs wherever you deploy it — as a Greengrass v2 component (IPC), a standalone HOST process, or a single-writer Kubernetes pod.

The organizing idea is that the file is the data product and the bus carries control. Image bytes are never published over MQTT or Greengrass IPC; they are written to disk, and a downstream component such as file-replicator picks them up from there. The adapter appears on the bus as ecv1/{device}/camera-adapter/… and answers UNS commands on its component inbox (ecv1/{device}/camera-adapter/cmd/sb/{verb}) — capture, group capture, status, queue control, reconnect, and capability-gated PTZ — alongside the library built-ins. A durable SQLite catalog makes submissions idempotent and lets sb/capture-status answer for any capture across a restart, so a broker outage degrades the adapter (it keeps capturing and persisting) rather than stopping it.

Doc	Start here when you want to…
Tutorial	learn by doing — bring one adapter up against the checked-in ONVIF simulator, submit a real command, and get the correlated reply
How-to guides	accomplish a specific task — schedule a camera, move/stop PTZ safely, use ONVIF auth and TLS, tune GenICam, configure RTSP fallback, hand files to file-replicator
Sample configurations	copy a complete, annotated config for your scenario and understand what each option makes the adapter do
Reference	look up an exact option, command, message field, metric, or supported protocol
Explanation	understand how it works and why — durable intent vs. camera I/O, the capture lifecycle, bounded admission, the catalog, image fidelity, and announcement-vs-delivery

Reference

• Configuration — every component.global and component.instances[] field, with defaults and meaning.
• Messaging interface — the sb/* command verbs, terminal app/image/* messages, error codes, and lifecycle events.
• Metrics and alarms — the health, capture, and queue metrics, the per-camera presence element, and the two component alarms.
• Compatibility — what the simulator stack validates, and the boundary of that validation.

Deployment

• HOST — one process for a disjoint camera set on Linux or Windows, plus Docker.
• Greengrass — the recipe template, durable paths, and least-privilege IPC policy.
• Kubernetes — a single active pod with a ReadWriteOnce PVC.

Quick routing

• “I’m new here.” → Tutorial.
• “What does this config option do?” → Reference — Configuration.
• “How do I trigger a capture, and what message comes back?” → Reference — Messaging interface.
• “How do I capture on a schedule instead of a command?” → How-to — Schedule a camera.
• “How do I capture several cameras as one set?” → Reference — Group schedules and the sb/capture-group verb.
• “How do I move a PTZ camera without leaving it moving?” → How-to — Move or stop PTZ safely.
• “Where do captured files go, and how does the consumer read them?” → How-to — Hand completed files to file-replicator.
• “Why didn’t I get a capture message?” → Explanation — Announcement, not delivery.
• “What does this metric or alarm mean?” → Reference — Metrics and alarms.
• “Will my physical camera work, and how do I validate it?” → Reference — Compatibility.

Audience

These docs are for integrators and operators — the people who deploy the adapter, write its configuration, and build the clients that command it and consume its captures. They describe the shipped runtime contract; they do not cover modifying the adapter’s own source. The internal design and release gates live in the repository’s DESIGN.md and IMPLEMENTATION_SPEC.md, which are not part of this site.