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Originally Posted by Wayne C.
Since we have few to nobody using the cameras and stacking vision tetras I think the opposite is probably the case.....
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I've been giving it some thought, and I think that FIRST may very well have known what they were getting us into by including the camera with the kit. The animation and the human simulation at kickoff both indicated that vision was going to be a simple task; both showed two teams on one alliance pursuing vision tetras, and the animation even showed a robot using vision during driver control to find the loading station. No one familiar with the technology could honestly believe it to be as simple of a task as it was portrayed, but that wasn't the point. Line tracking is a pretty simple task; many teams achieved it last year, and once it was done, the vast majority of us programmers got to sit around and watch the rest of our team slave away on mechanical issues. By giving a monumental, practically unattainable task, FIRST continued to strive for their stated goals; they don't care if our code works, but rather that we've been inspired. I personally spent dozens of hours trying to make the camera work, and all the time between ship date and competition was spent pondering how I could pull it off in only three more days of work. By the end of our regional, our team ended up hacking our camera box off the side of our robot, because I couldn't make it work. Did I succeed in capping a vision tetra? No. Did FIRST inspire me, and lead me to ponder programming tasks that I'd never even dreamed of? Absolutely, and I'm thrilled about it. It's fantastic that a very small group of teams have mastered the technology, but I wouldn't say that the teams that at least made an attempt (probably a sizable number... anybody remember the thread complaining about how easy programming was going to be this year?) have failed.