[weaversam8]

Something I'd add to the materials list is a green ring light to mount on the LifeCam. It's important for thresholding purposes.

As for advice, if you do decide to do vision, I'd suggest you toy around with GRIP and perhaps some basic python/opencv code in your own computer first, to get the basics down. It's important to decide what exactly you're trying to accomplish with vision, whether you're going goal alignment or gear alignment. I'd advise you look at other teams' well documented vision code for inspiration.