Hello,
I am currently working on vision tracking to find the tape around the peg using the Microsoft Life Cam 3000, and I have been having a lingering problem. I am using LabVIEW. My vision processing code works great, but when I reboot the robot (Turn it off and back on, not just reboot the roboRIO), all of the camera settings (white balance and exposure) are returned to automatic. As we all know, vision doesn't work very well like this
.
Here is a screen shot of my Vision Processing.vi.
As soon as I restart robot code from the drivers station, however, the camera settings return to what I set them to in my code, but the target is extremely dim.
Picture. When I redeploy the code, though, keeping the robot on, the target becomes very bright (how I want it to be).
Picture. Both of these shots were taken with THE SAME CODE WITH THE SAME SETTINGS. The only difference was that the first was taken after turning the robot on and restarting robot code, while the second was taken after the robot had been on and new code had just been deployed.
Last offseason was our first time using vision tracking, and we had the same problem. At our offseason events, we got around it by quickly restarting robot code as soon as we got communication, but I have a feeling this would be frowned upon at a Regional. Also, this didn't solve the problem of it being dim, but we were okay after we recalibrated the thresholds to detect it like this.
I did a thorough search on CD and Google, but I found no mention of this issue. Any suggestions on how to fix this problem are much appreciated! Do I need to initialize the camera in Begin.vi instead of just in Vision Processing.vi? Is this a problem with the Life Cam? Has anyone else ever run into this issue?
Thanks!
-Julia Cecchetti