[Tom Line]

I suspect if you'd performed a search you would have found numerous discussions about this.

First, don't make the mistake of believing that 'vision processing' is real-time. Even most of the fastest industrial robots take a single picture and work from that picture.

From that standpoint, the cRIO is more than capable of of processing a single frame in a fraction of a second. Or even more than a couple frames, if needed.

So, let's follow what you suggested: only run the vision processing when necessary. You certainly don't need to use it when you aren't trying to aim.

What most teams did last year was to take pictures only when the shoot button is pressed. Once the vision system finds a target that matches your parameters, it then calculates the postion and distance. Using that single number, it turns the robot or turret (or whatever) to the needed position.

Very few teams used off-board processing last year, and only a handful had the knowledge to run it at real-time speeds (341 comes to mind).

However, only analyzing pictures when needed and only getting one set of 'good' values to turn toward the target will not over stress your cRIO at all. If you're only running your CPU at 100% to process a couple of pictures in a fraction of a second, it's really not an issue. If you want to get really fancy, you could even turn all your other code 'off' (with a case structure) when you're running your vision routine while holding the shoot button. Be creative.