[beijing_strbow]

5968 spent quite a while developing an image processing algorithm to run on a Raspberry Pi (only to abandon it). I did most of the serial communication between the pi and roboRIO, and somebody else did the actual image processing algorithm.

Based on my experience, I wouldn't recommend it. First, the Raspberry Pi's built-in camera interface library doesn't support sending the image over serial as far as I could tell (which would have been slow anyway - we could have used USB, but still, going from PiCamera to serial is not very nice). This becomes an issue if you decide you want to stream the video to your driver station.

Also, it took upwards of 15 seconds to run the processing algorithm on the Pi. This could have been inefficiencies in the algorithm, but it ran in 3 or so seconds on a laptop.

The serial communication itself worked well though, once we got it working.

Perhaps our issues were a result of us trying it in our rookie year, which was probably a bit ambitious. I also haven't tried using a USB camera directly with the roboRIO, though we are going to experiment with that in the next few weeks.