Quote:
Originally Posted by jgannon
But c'mon... give the kid a break.
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1) He's an engineer, not a kid.
2) My exchange with Joe is a year old. I'm going to have a talk with some CMU professors I know, because they clearly aren't piling on enough work if you have this much free time on your hands

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3) In hindsight I can certainly see why you might think I was quick to jump on Joe, but you're not aware of the other messages that preceeded my exchange with him that convinced me he was playing the alpha-geek game. As there are few things in life I dislike more than getting pulled into an alpha-geek game, I quickly made it undesirable for Joe to continue so that I could get back to more enjoyable endeavors. One of the best methods to quickly stop such activity is to shine a light on it and call it what it is: bad behavior. Though my timing was off, this is exactly what I did, and it worked. Unfortunatly, because I was too quick to fix the problem, it made me look like I'm nuts, which may or not be true

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4) I think I have a few good reasons for choosing to use the RC PWM outputs rather than the CMUcam2 outputs. I've noticed quite a few questions about the subject this year, so I think I'll give the quick answer here and then follow-up with a more detailed answer in the FAQ if time allows.
Firstly, I wanted teams to have all the source code in their hands so that they could have something to improve upon should they desire, including the searching/tracking code.
Secondly, it made more sense to me to have the camera send t-packets as fast as it could (~11 Hz) by using the Track Color command. Otherwise I would need to used polled mode, which is much less efficient and possibly risky because I'd need to asynchronously cross clock domains twice, instead of once.
Third, I had a hard time getting the camera to initialize correctly. It would lock-up and stop communicating if I didn't send it commands with perfect timing and in just the right order. The experience dealing with the fragile communication interface made me a little apprehensive about using polled mode, and made the use of the streaming Track Color command that more attractive. The last thing I wanted was to be mentioned in the same sentence as the FRC scoring software, so I took the more conservative approach.
-Kevin