Capture and sync edge data

You can use the data management service to capture data from supported components and services, then sync it to the cloud. You can also sync data from arbitrary folders on your machine.

How data capture and data sync works

The data management service writes data from your configured Viam resources to local storage on your edge device and syncs data from the edge device to the cloud:

• The data management service writes captured data to local edge device storage (~/.viam/capture by default).
• The data management service syncs data to the Viam cloud at a configured sync interval using encrypted gRPC calls and deletes it from the disk once synced.
• You can capture and sync data independently; one can run without the other.

For more information, see How sync works.

Configure data capture and sync for individual resources

1. Navigate to a configured resource in Builder mode.

2. Find the Data capture section in the resource panel.

3. Click + Add method.

   

4. If you see a Capture disabled on data management service warning, click Enable capture on data management service.

5. Select a Method to capture data from.

   Camera capture methods

   Camera components provide two similar, but distinct capture methods:

   • GetImages (recommended): Returns one image for each camera sensor as a JPEG (for color sensors) or point cloud (for depth sensors).
   • ReadImage: Returns a single image in the specified MIME type, if the camera component supports that MIME type. Prefer GetImages unless your use case requires a specific MIME type other than JPEG.

6. Set the capture Frequency in hertz, for example to 0.2 with ReadImage on a camera to capture an image every 5 seconds.

7. Save your config.

You can add multiple methods with different capture frequencies.

For instructions on configuring data capture and sync with JSON, go to Advanced data capture and sync configurations and follow the instructions for JSON examples.

View captured data

1. Navigate to the DATA tab.
2. Select the Images, Files, Point clouds, or Sensors subtab.
3. Filter data by location, type of data, and more.

Stop data capture or data sync

Stop data capture for a specific resource

1. Navigate to the Data capture section of your resource’s configuration card.

2. Toggle the configured capture method’s switch to Off.

   

3. Save your config.

Stop data capture for all resources

1. Navigate to the Data capture section of the data management service configuration card.

2. Toggle the Capturing switch to Off.

   

3. Save your config.

Disable data sync

1. Navigate to the Cloud sync section of the data management service configuration card.

2. Toggle the Syncing switch to Off.

   

3. Save your config.

Next steps

For more information on available configuration attributes and options like capturing directly to MongoDB or conditional sync, see Advanced data capture and sync configurations. To leverage AI, you can now create a dataset with the data you’ve captured.