[willishf]

We figured out it was the camera as well. I had noticed during development that on occasion the camera image being displayed was 3-5 seconds behind live. So some fairly major buffering is occurring from the cRIO. If the bandwidth is marginal during a match(all teams using cameras or simply interference) then it is reasonable that any commands and responses get stuck in a queue behind video that is being buffered.

We are using Java and could never get the camera commands to set lower resolution/quality. With version 28 our camera connection stopped working for analytics in autonomous mode.

Trading email with wpi I got some advice to make sure the M1011 firmware was updated and to put the camera in DHCP mode versus static IP as indicated in the install guide. This implies the cRIO has a DHCP server and using axis software library to discover cameras. Made the changes and sure enough camera started working again.

Now the bad news. During practice at regionals they had a ton of problems getting robots to register. They fixed the problem at 3:30 and we were able to get in some practice sessions. Autonomous mode in our code was a big problem and we would loose the robot for short or long periods. Since we couldn't find the problem we turned off Autonomous mode but left the camera init in the code.

Our first three matches we had a dead non-controllable robot. Finally figured out issues with bandwidths could be the problem and then occurred to me that the camera was still streaming video and that wasn't helping. Disabled camera in the code and for the most part our robot control problems went away.

We finished 26 out of 60 at Florida Regionals as a rookie team where we really wanted those three matches back and would have placed much higher. We have a very reliable minibot, can score the top row and had autonomous mode working until it was disabled and couldn't spend time with all the other problems with communications. Just found out we won the Rookie Allstar award so we get to go to nationals and will see if we can get another shot at being a competitive robot.

Need to figure out in the Java api if it is possible to use the camera in autonomous mode and then disable it during the match. Has anyone had any luck setting the camera resolution/image quality or disabling the camera from streaming after startup?