[Danny Diaz]

Yes, the IMAQ Vision tools are what you are looking for. You can take snapshots from pretty much any camera source, provided you have a way to get the images into the system, and perform complex operations on the image. Pretty much everything you mentioned, no problem. The Vision tools are also highly optimized, but you do need to consider the fact that you're doing *software* manipulation of images and not *hardware* manipulation so the speed of your system and available memory will be a factor.

I am not sure if we are willing to donate any copies of the Vision tools to teams, but if you're curious you can send a request to frc[at]ni.com and ask - I know we've done it in the past for various school projects for high schools and Universities and even once a couple years ago for a FIRST team, so it only hurts not to ask.

-Danny