[Greg McKaskle]

It sounds like some, perhaps most, of the issues are with the gimbal construction or setup. If there still seem to be camera issues, I'd be glad to help out, and I'd love to hear what sorts of lighting works/doesn't work with the default values that were shipped.

A brief explanation. The hue colors are quite wide to allow different types of lights to still work. The green fabric in particular will tint to a different color based on sunlight, indoor fluorescent, indoor halogen, etc. The downside to having the colors set this wide is that they may identify too many other materials and colors as being the target color. Making it too narrow may miss the target when the light color changes. The current settings were selected to work in classrooms, shops, event lighting, and hopefully outdoors. If you find that you need to widen them further we'd really like to know the circumstances. If you decide to narrow them, that is fine, but hopefully not necessary.

The rest of the camera settings are hopefully fine provided the camera adapts the exposure to the scene lighting in a good way. The camera is set to use a light metering to adapt to the amount of light. This seems to work quite well with a lag of 0.5 sec or less. Certain lighting conditions can confuse it, and for this, the brightness setting is handy. This will shorten or lengthen the exposure computed using the light meter. With the green active targets, setting this low will keep the sensor from saturating, making the green light look green instead of white. Similarly, a spotlight on the target will cause glare on the target. If the background color is dark, the camera will average things out and will pick an exposure that is too long and will make the glare worse. Again, shortening the exposure with a small brightness number fixes this. Finally, if there are bright windows or lights shining into the camera, it may pick an exposure too short, making the targets appear dark. Raising the brightness in this case will help.

Again, we hope the defaults work in most cases and want to help and to hear when they don't.

Greg McKaskle