Overview

This application note describes how to connect the PMD flexx2 3D camera to the Renesas EVK board, and use the Royaleviewer camera UI running on the Renesas EVK for streaming data from the camera.

The PMD flexx2 3D camera is built on the Infineon’s IRS2381C REAL3™ Time-of-Flight Image Sensor and implements a PMD patented 3D Time-of-Flight Technology. The camera characteristics include up to 2.4M 3D points per second and 7 m measurement range with incredible data quality. The flexx2 camera comes with a special software development kit (SDK) “Royale”, that supports popular programming extensions including Matlab, OpenCV, and ROS 1+2. Refer to the PMD flexx2 product page for additional details:

https://3d.pmdtec.com/en/3d-cameras/flexx2/

Connecting the Camera

To connect the PMD flexx2 camera to the Renesas EVK kit, use a USB 3.1 Gen 1 compatible USB cable and connect the camera to the USB1 port of the carrier board.

For visualizing 3D video stream coming from the camera connect an HDMI display to the micro HDMI port of the Renesas EVK carrier.

The following picture illustrates connection of the camera and display to the kit:

Running Royaleviewer

On the Renesas EVK display, navigate to the Gnome application menu, and find the Royaleviewer icon. Run the Royaleviewer application, then press the “Start” button in the bottom right corner. The PMD flexx2 camera will initialize and start streaming the 3D visualization of the surrounding area.

Alternatively, Royaleviewer can be started from a serial or ssh connection using the below command line:

user@rzv2hevkalpha:~$ royaleviewer.sh

The following picture illustrates Royaleviewer running on a 800x480 HDMI display connected to the Renesas EVK board: