Ross Robotic Head Quickstart

Quickstart for the Ross heads supported by Seervision

This quickstart guide is aimed to help you get started in connecting a Ross robotic head to the Seervision Suite. Note that as of this writing, Seervision only supports the Ross Furio VR100 and VR600 robotic heads, as well as the CamBot 600XY.

Note: We actually suspect we support all Ross robotic heads that have tracking data output, but we haven’t been able to test these ourselves. If you have Ross hardware that has Tracking Data Output, we are happy to test this out with you!

We won’t be discussing the mounting, rigging and general setup of the robotic head, Ross Support usually handles these aspects. Below, we will only list the steps that must be taken in order for the Ross head to work with the Seervision Suite. This guide assumes that the Furio head is powered up and connected to the LAN.

Verifying the Furio Firmware

The first step is to access the Furio web interface and browsing to the Status & Logging tab. Under this tab, the Firmware Version should indicate a version equal or later than 5.3. If that is not the case, first update the firmware on this head – only the firmwares after 5.3 include the changes necessary to enable our tracking.

Enabling UDP tracking

The first step is to configure the Ross head to show additional tracking protocols in its web interface. This step will most likely have to be handled by your Ross representative, as it requires logging into the head over SSH.

  1. Log in to the head via SSH
  2. Modify the file under /home/vrone/Furio.properties
  3. Add in the line supervisor.showExtraTrackingProtocols=true
    1. You should see similar named lines around line 50 in this file
  4. Save and reboot. The Seer protocol should now be available in the Tracking tab in the web interface of the Ross robotic head

Configure UDP tracking

Once the Furio is on the correct firmware version and shows the additional tracking protocols, open the web interface again:

  1. Navigate to the Tracking tab
  2. Under the Protocol dropdown, select Seer as the protocol
  3. Under the Send IP column, configure at least one of the entries to point at the IP of the Seervision server that will be controlling this Furio head
  4. Make sure to tick the box next to the IP, and set the port to 10244
  5. You can leave the UART box unchecked
  6. Hit Save & Reboot

Set up lens control

All that’s left is to verify that the servo of the lens is connected to the Lens Drive port on the Furio head, usually via a 10- or 20-pin cable provided by your supplier.

Wrap-up

That’s it! The next steps would be to:

  1. Connect the camera SDI to the Seervision server, see SDI and Seervision
  2. Set up the Seervision server to correctly control the Furio head, see Seervision Server Setup