Pictures show up fine in the preview but when the picture is taken it is dark to illegible. Often the first one is fine. What can be done to fix this.
http://old-forum.kegbot.org/discussions/kegbot-tablet-app/12-camera-exposure-automatic-adjustments
This has been brought up before. I fine that adding a light source being the table helps. Not the best solution but it is a band aid fix for now.
Hey guys - yep, this is a bug, and probably a trivial one in the android app.
This is probably a good time for a shameless plug/plea: every bit of the Kegbot software is open source, and we will gladly accept fixes from intrepid bots. The reality is our meager hardware sales volume isn’t enough to pay the bills & constantly improve the software – so we look to you to fill in the gaps…
1 Like
(and sorry for the slight threadjack – it’s an issue that I want to get fixed soon, I guess I could just say it’s been hard to find the time)
It seems to have something to do with HDR on the Nexus, it is taking the three pics phones take for HDR ands show choosing the wrong one. I would be glad to do what I can to help troubleshoot, provide any info etc and test but I don’t think I have the skillset to debug what is wrong in the app… Is this only a problem with the nexus 7 or nexus 7 2013? Are there tablets this works with?
Thanks for any insight and help you can provide,
Bill
I have the newest version of nexus 7, and I am experiencing this if it helps l.
I experience it on a 2012 Nexus - I thought it was because of the backlight.
Anyone have any clue where to start with this issue? Does is happen on all tablet platforms?I think this should really be in the Caveats section on tablet selection, I specifically bought the nexus 7 because it says in the tablet guide “The best all-around tablet for Kegbot is the Nexus 7”. The photo piece of the app is really a key thing as far as the fun and utility, it seems a big drawback that it actually does not work on this tablet. I am willing to help in any way possible to resolve.
Thanks,
Bill
Really sorry about this - it’s an annoying bug and one that probably has an easy fix, yet I haven’t had the time to dig into it.
One thing to note, as far as I’m aware only the preview is dark – the save image should turn out just fine. (Please confirm or refute this!)
I believe this started happening with KitKat, at least on nexus 7. My guess is it’s some obscure / emergent behavior of the android camera API (on that platform only?), which if you’re an android developer you know is one of the most atrocious areas of the platform API.
If any android devs want to take a look at this and need specific help, I’d be happy to chime in. Otherwise realistically it’ll probably be a week or two until I can set aside the time to properly triage this.
This is not exactly the behavior. The very first picture it snaps the preview is dark, the image is fine. If you click the button to retake both the preview and the saved picture are dark.
I did some testing on this a while back. I wrote an Android app that just accesses the camera and takes a snap as simply as possible. There was no way on the Nexus 7 2013 to get a good picture. I messed around with white balance and other things exposed in the API but no luck. The same app on the Nexus 7 2012 worked just fine. It may indeed be an issue with HDR on the device, but it does not seem to be a bug in Kegbot. I think Google would have to fix this one for us… I actually switched back to the 2012 because of this bug.
@midblue: thanks for testing. Can you confirm it’s just the preview (and not the saved image)?
I can’t believe it’s endemic to the platform since other apps (like the built-in camera app) do work… But Camera/CameraParameters.java are totally miserable to deal with; I’m guessing the solution will look a bit like magic…
For me the issue was that the preview looked just fine, but when the photo is taken, both the image that is displayed and the image that is saved are both too dark. I first tried to emulate the way that kegbot was doing things, and reproduced the behavior, but no amount of tweaking the parameters worked. I didn’t look into HDR, perhaps that’s something to try, i.e. specifically disabling HDR…
@midblue thanks for the follow up. I’ve tried a lot of the same things and it gives me more confidence that I didn’t miss something obvious…
Next on my list was going to be trying cwac-camera in place of my homespun camera/preview classes. If you’re bored / interested in investigating, I’m all ears!
(But yeah, this is sounding like a deeper platform issue as feared…)
Would it be possible for someone to test this against installing different ROMs? One of the various ROM devs for both versions of the Nex7 might have already solved this problem for you guys.
I have used the ElementalX Rom and the stock and they both exhibit the same problem. Can someone confirm this does or doesn’t occur on the 2012 version. Because if it is not an issue on the 2012 I am just going to get one of those and sell the 2013.
Thanks
Bill
I just updated my 2013 to Lollipop and now this is happening, I was running 4.4.2 before and it didn’t do the dark photos. So odd.
Are the photos dark themselves, or is it just the displayed photo? Sometimes with mine the app shows it dark, but it is parfectly normal on the server side.
I hate to resurrect old threads, but is anybody still experiencing this issue?
Im running a Nexus 7 3G with Android 7.1.2 AOSP with the latest release of kegbot-android and am unable to reproduce this bug.