Tracking- Ultrasonic, or Camera?

[wdburk3160]

I was wondering, has anybody used the ultrasonic sensor for tracking purposes, and if so, is it more or less efficient, harder or easier to program, than the camera?

[~Cory~]

What do you want to track? Distance to a goal? Distance to a wall?

An ultrasonic sensor will give only distance. A camera can give distances and much more, but is significantly harder to program.

[wdburk3160]

We're thinking distance to a goal. We were wanting to maybe have a light light up when the ultrasonic sensed the goal in a certain range. We are also wanting to just get camera feedback so we can eyeball it as well.

[wdburk3160]

Most of our programmers, including myself are rookie programmers. We were considering ultrasonic because we don't know if we can figure out camera in time.

[Greg McKaskle]

If you can access the cRIO and sensors, you should look at some of the examples for each and see if you can use what they return.

Greg McKaskle

[tcjinaz]

What do you want to track? Distance to a goal? Distance to a wall?

An ultrasonic sensor will give only distance. A camera can give distances and much more, but is significantly harder to program.

By mounting the ultrasonic on a servo, direction becomes available.

Last year's Good Idea that would have won an engineering award (given that the winner used the ultrasonic like we did, without the servo for a search capability) if more than one of the kids who talked to a Judge had known about it :(

There's a team prep lesson in there...