[Greg McKaskle]

Keep in mind that if you have the roboRIO's VI panel open and you are watching the images, the roboRIO is also needing to compress the images and send them to the LabVIEW debugging session. So before you know what your fps is, be sure to close the debug panel.

To discuss the resolution of the camera. The key here is the number of pixels that represent the smallest feature that you care about in the image. For this game, it is probably the target tape. The tape is 2" wide, and at distance y using camera x, you can use Vision Assistant or another tool to count the pixels that represent the 2" tape. The number of pixels affects the accuracy of measurements you make on that feature of your image. If your 2" results in 20 pixels, then a small error due to alignment/lens/lighting/vibration will result in a measure of 19 or 21 pixels instead. This would give you a swing of 5% on width related measurements. If you image has only 4 pixels for the 2" line, that same swing is from 3 to 5 -- or probably too large for you to feed into anything affecting your shooter. The above is just to demonstrate the concept and is a conservative way to think about resolution.

The first thing to do is to make the measurement and see if you can drop the resolution down without affecting the accuracy of what you are measuring. I think that anywhere from 5 to 10 pixels is typically plenty. After all, you probably aren't measuring the 2" tape, but the 20" width or the 14" height.

Greg McKaskle