[Chris_Elston]

Labview gave us an edge last year with a couple of things, but not required. I'll go over a couple of points.

1. Camera settings for EasyC. You can play with the filtering and color settings to get what you need. Labview dumps a configuration file needed to initializes the camera. Of course you can use the default configuration file, but we didn't like it because it picked up white fluorescent lights in the shop. We have settings for the camera that would see a green light but not a fluorescent white light using onboard filtering in the CMUcam. We got these settings playing with labview cmuCam application sliders and buttons to change the filtering and coloring.

2. We used Labview to help us understand our shooter PID wheel. We could watch the response from the PWM by building a custom dashboard monitor and watching all the values and having labview log this information into a graph so we could watch response and tuning of PID's. Using three trim pots onboard and labview, we could tune our PID, sort of ok...

If you don't have labview, you atleast need that Java GUI mentioned above. So you can verify your focus on your camera. Once focused, tape the lens or loc-tight the lens so vibration doesn't cause it to come unfocused during match play, since screwing it in and out changes the focus.

Focus is critical for depth perception of the camera. If the image looks blurry, then your blob size looks bigger and throws off your range based on blob size. Atleast that how we determine range, watch the blob size of the light and make calibration scale on your field "masking tape on the floor" and come up with liner scale in the software world. 10 feet away from the light, the blob size is equal to "X", 20 feet away and the blob size is equal to "X".