Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik
This whitepaper is documenting how to attach a second camera and add it to the driverstation display. In this game, likely as a POV camera for ball hunting. As described in the whitepaper, this takes about 30 minutes or less of programming, and no particular expertise.
So I fail to see how adding an entire laptop with USB cameras is a more economical solution to this problem. (Axis cameras are about $125, by the way. Is that a $200 laptop?) And then there's the complication of the custom code on your laptop and interfacing that to the code on the driverstation to display the video from the cameras.
So, while a secondary laptop for image processing is a nifty idea, I don't think it has any relevance whatsoever to this (rather good) whitepaper.
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3 Axis cameras at $125 each would be $375. I originally wrote:
"Consider how much 3 of those Axis cameras would cost versus the $25 webcams."
However, now that you've stated you've been getting them for $125 each can you tell us how? Last year when we bought them they were at least $150 each.
If you really want to send the video back to the driver's station from a webcam(s) attached to a robot mounted laptop there are quite a few ways to achieve that. Including but not limited to installing VideoLAN and streaming it from the laptop on the robot to the laptop at the driver's station.
Here's an example of how to do it in Linux (which is what the students had on our robot laptop) and even rebroadcast that to the Internet:
http://www.wikihow.com/Stream-Your-Webcam
BTW, this example uses UDP, not TCP, which might actually come in handy if you do start dropping packets.
This method gives you fine control over both ends of the streaming, including the compression methods, transmission protocols, and the communications stacks themselves (for example you can reduce the MTU, you can increase the receive window, etc).
There's no problem with the whitepaper at all it is great work. There is just more than one way to do this and there shouldn't be any problem with mentioning that considering the title of the topic in question is: "How to Get Multiple Cameras on Robot". Consider for archival sake what will happen if someone searches for that later when this topic is less recent.
Sorry if I've ruffled anyone's feathers wasn't my intent.