[ericand]

Why live video? This year team 1425 had a legal recording video camera on its robot for almost all of its matches. I don't really see the value of having the robot POV live. The field of view was too narrow to really see all that was going on. I know that if I was watching live, I wanted to see the whole field. The robot POV was good to pick up more details later.

The video is recorded by an Oregon Scientific helmet camera onto an SD card and periodically dumped to a computer. The helmet camera that 1425 used only records at 15 FPS (640x480) but it is a couple of years old. The same manufacturer has a newer one that records at 30fps. The camera's battery tray was replaced by a plug and wired into a custom curcuit to get the 5V needed to run the camera. The camera is fixed focus (so no extra motors), and does not have any lights or other possibly distracting elements (it looks like a black tube). The SD card is 1GB and can hold about 1 hour worth of video. Each match is an AVI file averaging about 100-120MB in size. About half of that size is the robot waiting for the match to start.

We would play loops of previous matches in our pit area at the competiton - and we gave copies of the videos to anyone who asked.

We still need to edit out much of the sitting around time, but we are hoping to post what we have (Portland, San Diego, Las Vegas, Galileo) sometime in the near future. I thik it would be very cool to edit match video to combine shots from both external cameras and the robot POV.

If we really need/want live, I would suggest making a mounting spec for a camera to be supplied by FIRST for the event. Teams would build their robot with a mount point and reserve weight in the robot's weight allowance to account for the camera. FIRST would then check the camera out to teams that would volunteer to let it ride with them.