As the starter of this thread, I'm happy to report that I finally managed to get the camera working on Saturday, and managed to score twice in Autonomous mode. Once in the seed matches and once in eliminations.
Both times were 100% camera directed as the bot started out-off target, stopped, turned towards the light, ran forward, overshot by about 4 inches, backed up and dropped the tube. It was a joy to watch.... I need to post video
Unfortunately, I had changed two things prior to the match.... so no definiative answer as to the cause/solution.
1) Yes we did change the camera, because once we got the GUI hooked up, we were unable to re-focus the picture. It was focussed prior to shipping, but i couldn't get it to re-focus, so I don't know if there is any way to permanently miss-align the optics. The poorly focussed camera was able to deal with the light in a benign environment, but not on the high intensity field.
2) The other factor that caused me concern is that the target.cfg file that the labview GUI is using has a bunch more parameters than are being set by the default camera.c/h code. It occured to me that it may be a requirement to FIRST load the target parameters using the Labview GUI, and then the Kevin Watson code jsu loads a subset of the commands required for color tuning. Since the last thing we did with the camera before shipping was focus it, we had would have loaded the default "human viewing" camera configurations. It occured to me that these settings may had left some parameters set badly for tracking....
Anyway, we made both of these changes in a vain hope that one or both would make the difference.....
Clearly, having a well focussed camera is important, but I KNOW that it was focussed in Pittsburg & we still had the problem on the field, so maybe the trick is ALSO loading the 2006target.cfg once, to set the "other" parameters.
Phil.
edit: Ha Ha... I see our programmer also just posted the same informnation... Hi Sarah