[Greg McKaskle]

If you are using the ellipse detection like the default code is, the white balance setting shouldn't matter much. The first thing the code does is extract a grayscale luminance image. You might as well use a fixed setting IMO.

There is a white paper on the NI site that talks about the camera code and some of the things to consider. One thing that seems far more likely in a shop than in a competition is streaked lighting. If you've built a shiny target and you have rows of fluorescent lights, they tend to make long white streaks across the black of the target. You can see them if you kneel down and look at it from the camera's vantage point. Other than that, you would like to get a good contrast level, and fast camera response.

If you have images that do not work well with the ellipse code, post the image and perhaps people can help diagnose and suggest solutions. BTW, the default dashboard saves an image every second and keeps the last sixty in the documents directory I think. That will hopefully help document the camera performance and give you some data to crunch on to test out different approaches.

Greg McKaskle