[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by mechanicalbrain

but agian your compairing apples to roated cow tung. im using equipment readily available to anyone. all the examples you give are people being used to an advantage. im using a readily available sensor to have a different perspective. and NO i wouldnt be knowingly cheating since i feal that the rules are contradictory in nature and i would resent any implication of that statement if i wasnt sure you were using that statment as advice. this is like if someone used a CMU cam to find and move balls in last years game you would also be angry?

Just because something is available to everyone doesn't mean it's allowed. There are certain things you just cannot have or use for certain purposes. Also, unfortunately what you "feel" the rules are isn't necesarrily the way FIRST "feels" the rules are.

Anyway, the heart of the matter is what I said before. FIRST doesn't want the drivers getting any feedback that is not coming through the IFI radio. It is part of the game/design challenge.

If you could somehow use the camera to seek out targets, it is possible you could have an auxiliary circuiot that could process what the camera sees, and then send that info to the RC so the RC can make a desicion to "seek" out that target or not. That would be legal. But any feedback directly to the driver without first going through the RC is not allowed. For example, you could not have an independent LED/LCD display that receives data from some encoders with wireless interfaces (if there were such a thing) in your driver station that tells you the RPM of your drive motors. The camera is no different.

Note: I do think it is a really cool idea if FIRST ever did allow it and/or for experimentation/demos/etc.