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D3DShot
Discontinued Extremely fast and robust screen capture on Windows with the Desktop Duplication API
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InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
By using the Python package d3dshot, we can grab a screenshot of our RealFlight environment (we'll take just the part showing the downward-facing camera feed), and then send this image data (encoded using OpenCV) over UDP. On another computer we can have a script running with a UDP socket open and waiting to receive these messages. This script is representing the third-party peripheral, which in real life would be capable of obtaining the video footage on its own. Nonetheless, the peripheral now has its data to analyze. The important thing to note here is that this peripheral is self-contained. It is not part of the autopilot (it's written in Python, for one thing), and thus its hardware and software can be developed without any integration concerns, provided that it conforms to the autopilot's API. So while this "peripheral" currently exists on the same computer that is running the autopilot, this is by no means a constraint, and it will soon be moved to a separate piece of hardware. So what, you may ask, it the point of this peripheral? Well, that will just have to wait until next time. But I think it's pretty cool, so hopefully you'll come back to check it out. You're very patient, dear reader. That's what I appreciates about you. -Greg