[faust1706]

1) We used the X2 board this year booted with the latest version of ubuntu. We did not have a compiler on it and instead did everything through terminal. Ubuntu is used in nearly all research groups with computer science. It has a fast compile time, and best of all, it is free.

2)Download the OpenCV libraries are pretty straight forward. You can easily figure it out from the website.

3) I would start with simply grabbing an image from the webcam, and going from there. I have a paper posted on here describing 2012's vision program that I wrote. Although I don't expect you to write a program that mathematically intensive anytime soon (linear algebra, eigenvalues to eigenvectors), it is a good start to the thought process of how to track an target.

4) I give this idea's credit to my mentor, the environment we used is QT. We sent a UDP message from the board, to the router on the robot, to the cRIO, I could send you an example portion of that if you'd like. I do not know how the cRIO programmer read the UDP message, but I'm sure it wasn't terribly complicated and I could figure out how if you'd like.

I hope this helped. Our team has won 2 engineering excellence rewards with our computer vision and how we used the solutions.

If you have any questions, please pm me.