Re: How far have you gotten on coding the camera tracking?
 

The way I did it when it absolutely failed to pick anything up was to start with the range 0-255 for all 3 (hue, saturation, and luminance) and narrow it down from there. Slow, but it works.

Did you put the jumpers next to the servo pwms? Are the pwms in the program the correct ones/where the servos are plugged in?

-jonathan

Re: How far have you gotten on coding the camera tracking?
 

If you aren't having any luck with the colors, you might try the NI Vision assistant. It is an easy way to bring in an image and check out the pixels in HSL. Ideally, you get in the habit of grabbing a couple photos in different orientations, different amounts of light, etc. Then you get a better feel for the range of HSL values needed to cover the different lighting.

Greg McKaskle

Re: How far have you gotten on coding the camera tracking?
 

Yes, I know that the pwm's are correct because we have code to be able to control them with a joystick on the same pwm channels. I'm checking it out now and seeing if we can get it to work, but a lot of our focus is on the encoders at this point in time.

Re: How far have you gotten on coding the camera tracking?
 

We have our camera tracking ok. It commands a motor to turn a turret to keep the image in the center of its field of view. The problem we are having is the camera/turret is constantly oscillating back and forth trying to find the center. Any ideas of how to put in a PID loop into Labveiw? I am not up on the programming, just trying to help our programmer out.

Re: How far have you gotten on coding the camera tracking?
 

It sounds like it would be easiest for you to just have a dead zone in the center of the image - if the target is within a certain bounding box in the center of the image don't try to adjust it any further. Rather than try to center it at the center pixel, aim for a box around the center. It oscillates because the image changes slightly frame-to-frame.

Re: How far have you gotten on coding the camera tracking?
 

It took us a very long time to finally get it to the point that it worked, but we do have it working...

Re: How far have you gotten on coding the camera tracking?
 

We ran into some pretty massive problems. No matter what we seemed to do, the camera would intermittently find a color (or two) for a few seconds, then x and y would immediately go to maximum. We assumed it was centering on the fluorescent lights in the room, but we're not entirely sure. And it was doing this both with our code and the TwoColorTrackingDemo code. I don't think the camera was at fault, as images grabbed from it looked just fine. We tried manually defining the color fields a couple times but that didn't help. Mind you we're using C/Windriver.

Re: How far have you gotten on coding the camera tracking?
 

We've spent a long time on our camera tracking code, and it finally works very well! (The night before our regional, too. Phew!) Our robot has a shooter, and we're using the camera to aim it at targets and then calculate how far it should fire. I'm pretty sure we'll post all our code on CD at the end of competition season, in case anybody's interested. We also have a pretty cool dashboard :)