[Greg McKaskle]

To use the lighting to detect targets at full court, you'll need to do several things.

You need to make sure you run the camera at a high enough resolution that the 4" wide lines are several pixels wide. 320x240 should do, but it may require 640x480. Get images and measure.

You'll need to calibrate the exposure on the camera to darken the normal scene more than normal. You may be able to do this just with the Brightness setting, but it may be useful to set it to auto, expose it to a bright light, and set it to hold. This will also help keep the colors from the LED ring stay saturated.

You'll need to use brighter LEDs or more of them. If this is the only place the targeting will be used, you can also use a flashlight or other lens system to narrow the beam and concentrate the light where you want it. The intensity of light drops of as distance squared, so the reflected light will be 1/4th as bright as full court as at mid-court.

Finally, you may find that the initial settings for particle size are set too low for full court detection. The .5% threshold is used to ignore particles that are smaller than a certain size. As the robot backs up, particles shrink, and at some point you need to lower the threshold to keep the recognition of the targets. .5% work out to about 400 pixels on a 320x240 image, so watch the particle area of the targets to see what range they are in.

Greg McKaskle