[Jared]

1. We use the driver station laptop, like 341 did in 2012
2. LabVIEW. We took the vision example meant for the cRIO and copy and pasted in into our LabVIEW dashboard.
3. Axis Camera
4. Network Tables

The main advantage to this setup is ease of use. Getting a more complicated setup working can be difficult and have lots of tricky bugs to find. Using our driver station laptop (intel core 2 duo @ 2.0 GHz, 3 Gb RAM) gave us more than enough processing power (we could go up to 30 fps) and was the cheapest and simplest solution. The LabVIEW software is great for debugging because you can see the value of any variable/image at any time, so it's easy to find out what isn't working, and a pretty decent example was provided for us. The axis camera was another easy solution because we already had one and the library to communicate/change exposure settings was already there.

The network tables approach worked really well too and we got very little latency with this approach. We were able to auto line up (using our drive system, not a turret) with the goal in about a second, and we had it working before the end of week one, after spending about 2 hours with two people. In the end we didn't need it in competition, we could line up by hitting the tower.

We're doing the same approach this year for the hot/not hot goal. Compared to the other solutions, this is the cheapest/quickest/simplest, but you loose the advanced features of openCV. NI's vision libraries are pretty good, and the vision assistant program works nicely too, but in the end, some people say openCV has more. You need to decide if the extra features are worth the extra work for your team.