Questions if Zed 2i is Right

I have a few questions regarding the zed 2i stereo camera.

Are each of the cameras individually addressable, or is it a unified video stream? I would like to get each camera individually.

My use case is to have it on a small rc boat. I see that it has an IP66 rating. How well would that do on the water? The goal is not to submerge it, but there is a high probability of getting wet, and always a small risk of being submerged.

My vision system uses gstreamer and deepstream, and I see that there is a gstreamer plugin for the camera. How well does it work? Is it also possible to interact through v4l2?

Hi @T.Peace

You can retrieve the streams separately by using the ZED SDK API.

IP66 means Ingress Protection 66, per IEC 60529. The two digits break down as:

First digit (6) — Solid particle protection: Dust-tight. Complete protection against contact with internal components and no ingress of dust whatsoever.

Second digit (6) — Liquid ingress protection: Protection against powerful water jets. Water projected in powerful jets (12.5 mm nozzle) from any direction shall have no harmful effects. Test conditions are typically 100 liters/min at 100 kPa pressure from 3 meters distance for at least 3 minutes.

In practice, an IP66-rated enclosure can handle direct high-pressure washdowns (e.g., industrial cleaning) and operate in dusty outdoor environments without issues — but it is not rated for immersion. For submersion, you’d need a second digit of 7 (temporary, up to 1 m) or 8 (continuous).

We provide GStreamer elements to use our cameras:
GitHub: GitHub - stereolabs/zed-gstreamer: Package of GStreamer elements to interface with ZED Cameras · GitHub
Documentation: Getting Started with GStreamer and ZED - Stereolabs