Re: The Secret Book of FRC LabVIEW
 

In page 127 it says:
You've already changed the 100ms to 20ms, so this sentence is wrong.
You actually need 50fps to be at the same rate as the communication :)

Re: The Secret Book of FRC LabVIEW
 

Thank you for putting together this manual, it is a great resource.

I have a question regarding your discussion on file organization, page 50, do you have any examples for this:

Thanks

Re: The Secret Book of FRC LabVIEW
 

Thanks for noticing. This kind of catch is very helpful. A revised version is attached.

I wrote utilities for zipping and unzipping the project to a flash drive (for backup and moving the code between computers). It is 10X easier to write this routine if the file structure is flat.

Re: The Secret Book of FRC LabVIEW
 

Excellent work!
I am starting through the Ver. 0.4 now. If I come across any errors, or have any suggestions, I'll post them right away.

Re: The Secret Book of FRC LabVIEW
 

Thanks so much for the book. You saved me!

Re: The Secret Book of FRC LabVIEW
 

Here it is! What you have all been waiting for!! (Or not.) The latest revision to the Secret Book, covering the 2014 Framework, reentrant VIs, and how to actually use a PID in your robot.

As always, I welcome corrections, but also suggestions for new topics, or places where I have not explained things as clearly as I should have...

Cheers to all!
-GN

Re: The Secret Book of FRC LabVIEW
 

Thanks for this AWESOME resource!

If you're still taking small edits, there's a small typo on page 123 (of book, not PDF).

In the "Loop 2" paragraph, last sentence: "We’ll discuss the stuff you can see first, and then spend some time on the
Dashboard JMPG VI, because in 2014 this has become a pretty sophisticated routine."

Isn't that supposed to be MJPG?

Love this book and I'm making all of my programmers read through it.

Thanks again!

Re: The Secret Book of FRC LabVIEW
 

Holy Moose stuffing Batman!:D
I can really use this for our students. Nice work. Hope you can find the time and motivation to keep it up to date.

Re: The Secret Book of FRC LabVIEW
 

Can't wait to start reading. On a side note, that's a very nice random image you have there. I like it.

Re: The Secret Book of FRC LabVIEW
 

If I am not a programmer, and I like to use LV with EV3 because it is easy to bulid and work with.
How I can began my tranining

Re: The Secret Book of FRC LabVIEW
 

First off, thank you for the book. This is our first year using LabView and it has helped us greatly. Our two primary software mentors have never used LabView before, and this book was their primary source for teaching it to the kids. I have used LabView a little bit in the past, but mostly for instrumentation control and display, never for anything complicated.


I'm trying to run through your vision example before I try and teach it to my kids. I have successfully made the distance calculations work based on the target heights, but the angle calculations are not working. I believe my problem is the blob sizes and locations are incorrect due to looking at them from an angle. This is making my calculation of the separation in x in pixels wrong, which throws everything else off. I have spent three days trying to hunt down the problem, but I'm out of ideas.

Has anyone actually earned their Image Processing Zen Master merit badge? If so, I could use some tips.

Re: The Secret Book of FRC LabVIEW
 

The distance calculation in the example uses the width of the blob as a proportion of the image size. If you scroll down on the diagram, it has some pictures and formulae to show what it is doing. By the way, this estimator works better for some field positions than for others. It is also possible to use the height of the blob, the area of the blob, or use tools like the clamps to measure things more precisely than the bounding box.

Tutorial 8 in the Getting Started also discusses this a bit, but I don't remember how much detail it goes into.

If you have other questions, I am happy to help.
Greg McKaskle

Re: The Secret Book of FRC LabVIEW
 

Without knowing exactly what you are doing... In general, the apparent size of things will be wrong, depending on where they are in the image, how your camera is pointing, etc. Suppose your camera is pointing straight at a wall a distance d away, and there is a target of height h (height in pixels hp) positioned exactly where the camera is pointing. Then that target will subtend an angle tan(theta) = h/d.

But now, if the same target is high up on the wall, it will span fewer pixels. If the line from the camera to the center of the target makes an angle phi to the horizontal, then the target will appear to be only cos(phi)*hp pixels tall. This is an approximation, because the target is also farther away, but depending on the details, that may be good enough. If you are close in, then the difference will be larger and you will have to apply Pythagoras.

Hope that helps...

Re: The Secret Book of FRC LabVIEW
 

I recently discovered some of our students were using this as a resource for self teaching in the offseason!

I have been going through it and recommend it to all looking for a good learning tool - very comprehensive - not just the basics.
This augments the nice NI tutorials incuded with Labview.
Best Labview resource I have seen since FRC Mastery .

Bumping now as maybe folks are thinking about training for the Fall.

Be nice if their was an update for the RoboRio, and maybe add new SRX CAN functionality.

Re: The Secret Book of FRC LabVIEW
 

Far be it from me to put something like this on someone's plate, but maybe a couple of knowledgeable people could go through it and suggest/add some revisions to bring it up to date, with Geoff's permission?

I've been out of the programming loop the past couple of years, but agree it's a great resource. I've been recommending it myself for some time. With some updates for newer hardware that's become available and newer versions of LabVIEW, it would continue to be a valuable tool.