Re: Camera to motor setup
 

Acutally, I was thinking of mounting the camera on top of the turret, and setting up the motors so that it would automatically swing the turret until the camera reads 0 pan and 0 tilt without any code modification. Would that work?

Re: Camera to motor setup
 

It should, but you need to recognize something that might make it work less well than you expect. The camera code doesn't move the tilt or pan servos until the vision target gets "far enough" from the center of the view.

Re: Camera to motor setup
 

What do you mean by this?

Re: Camera to motor setup
 

Look at tracking.c in the camera code provided by Kevin Watson. In the servo_track() function, it checks to see how many pixels off-center the target is. Only if it's more than Pan_Allowable_Error left or right, or Tilt_Allowable_Error up or down, does it actually move the servo to recenter the target in the camera's field of view.

So if you want to be as accurate as possible, you need to move the turret to zero the pan/tilt servo values and also cause the mx/my values returned from the camera to match the target pixel values.

Re: Camera to motor setup
 

sorry. I meant gyro.

Re: Camera to motor setup
 

If you mean 127 pan and 127 tilt, then yes, it works very, very nicely ;)

Re: Camera to motor setup
 

Did you or anyone ever get the Camera to Motor setup working?

Re: Camera to motor setup
 

Our team used a heavily modified version of Kevin's PID code,
basically all you have to do is add another motor to the motor_info data struct, and change the get_encoder_value function so that it returns PAN_SERVO when the argument is 2
now simply call set_pos(2,127)
and set your left and right drive motors to =motor_info[2].pwm+127; and 127-motor_info[3].pwm; (this may need to be change depending on your wiring and robot setup)

you may have to tweak the P, I, D constants

We had it working beautifully until we did some other stuff and screwed it up... :(
(we used our own custom PID software... but i think i'm gonna switch back to kevins because i can't figure out whats wrong with ours... and I didn't write it so I don't understand it 100%)

Re: Camera to motor setup
 

We don't have encoders working and it is far too late to implement them into our bot.


On a side note, we did the zero point method making the servo's and motor values equal to the search value, it works beautifully when we implemented. Basically the human player controls the turret until the "find target" button is pressed. Then the camera re-aligns the turret to aim for the green.

Re: Camera to motor setup
 

you don't need encoders, you can fake the system.... just put the camera pan servo value in place of the encoder count, the PID math is the same