Hi CD,
We have been struggling with the camera stream to SmartDashboard.
General info about our setup:
- In all situations the camera is an Axis M206, reset and configured through the FRC Camera setup application.
- In all situations where I believed the camera should have been working, I could ping the camera, access the settings at 10.16.75.11 in a browser, and anonymous viewing was enabled.
- In all situations we are using a cRIO-FRCII with the camera running through our DAP-1522 bridge.
- In all situations we are attempting to stream through a Camera widget on the SmartDashboard pointing at 10.16.75.11
We had it working at Pittsburgh but ditched it because it was lagging the DS (assuming now that it was due to FPS being 30). I'll run through everything I can remember we've done to it.
- We streamed at the default resolution at the default compression and FPS for one or two matches.
- The next match the camera lagged the entire driver station. We also had a mixup at this point where we hooked up the driver station in the wrong station and had to switch, but we don't think this affected anything.
- We experimented in the pit with resolution and compression. Even at lowest resolution and 100% compression we were lagging the DS (dropped packets, high latency). Didn't think to alter the FPS. After this we ditched the camera streaming for the rest of the competition.
We ended up crashing onto our camera in the quarterfinals. We nabbed another M206 from a friendly team in Milwaukee because our old camera doesn't seem to reset itself correctly. Anyway, the new one was reset and set up the same exact way as the old one. However, now I cannot get a stream with default settings or lower.
TL;DR:
- Camera imaged correctly and accessible through ping and browser
- Anonymous viewing turned on for SmartDashboard
- Using cRIO-FRCII and camera connected through bridge
- Camera not streaming to SmartDashboard Camera widget configured to read from 10.16.75.11
EDIT: Upon turning everything on this morning, it miraculously decided to work again... sigh. I did try restarting everything on Thursday but I guess it working again is a good thing.
EDIT 2: After changing the FPS settings and power cycling, the stream is not going to the SmartDashboard again although we can go to it in a browser and ping it. It also worked one time yesterday before failing. Back to square 1! We're checking to see if it works at least once more with a full shutdown and reset of everything again.
EDIT 3: We've determined that the cause of not working is changing the FPS setting of the M206. If the setting is anything except "Unlimited" or 30 (from the range of 10 to 30) the stream refuses to go through to the SmartDashboard. Does anyone have any ideas on how to lower the FPS while still being able to stream to SmartDashboard?