Saving feedback to a flashdrive

[MiniNerd24]

Hi, our team was talking about having our camera relay live feedback of it's view during competition to our website. The day we tested out the camera it lagged so badly doing a 1st person driving test that I crashed into a large object. So I remembered that we used a flashdrive to upload the new DS firmware so i was wondering. Would it work/Would it be FRC legal to have a flashdrive plugged into the DS saving camera feedback (and possibly other feedback) on the flashdrive for later uploading to a webiste or for reviewing purposes?
If someone could help me that'd be great. Thanks in advance!

[whitetiger0990]

Nope. Sorry. I wish.

The flashdrive access is reading from the flashdrive, and is only for updating the DS. We don't have access to any writing (or reading) functions for the DS.


Unless I'm horribly mistaken. If you can figure out how to do it without modifying the DS firmware, I'd be interested.

[Russ Beavis]

Why not write data to the cRIO's solid state "disk"?

Russ

[Bongle]

Originally Posted by Russ Beavis

Why not write data to the cRIO's solid state "disk"?

Russ

We did some tests early in the season when we were tuning our target colours where we saved a couple hundred 160x120 JPGs to the cRio. It took quite a while to save even those tiny images. I think having a thread saving images would greatly hurt your performance in the match.

On the other hand, you could have a button your drivers could press to take a snapshot (frcWriteImage in WindRiver), then maybe collage it with your own video of the match.

And I believe there has always been a rule saying that teams could strap a video camera to their robot for marketing/documentary purposes, though it'd probably be counted in your weight budget.

[MiniNerd24]

So we it'd be advisable to skip trying to save things to the DS and instead save to the cRio for small things>?

[Russ Beavis]

Since the DS isn't programmable, you're essentially out-of-luck on the driver side (except for twiddling some outputs and using a custom circuit to store data transitions, yuck).

You could have the Dashboard PC record every packet of data sent from the robot. That would be easy but is limited to about 1k bytes at 50 times/sec. Could be very useful but won't be terribly good at storing a video stream.

You should be able to store many megabytes directly in the cRIO but I'm not sure about update rate. Maybe you can store pictures in RAM and dump them to nonvolatile memory later on?

Russ

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by MiniNerd24

Hi, our team was talking about having our camera relay live feedback of it's view during competition...

Be aware that the network will be blocking the live camera feedback on the competition field. Whatever you figure out for saving the video will be of no use without it.

[Daniel_LaFleur]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

Be aware that the network will be blocking the live camera feedback on the competition field. Whatever you figure out for saving the video will be of no use without it.

Incorrect. See here.

The standard live video ports on layer 3 will be disabled, but the video can be deconstructed, sent in packetized format to the dashboard, and reconstructed.

It will, of course, be horribly delayed and take up much of the cRIOs processor power.

If the OP is just looking to record the match through the 'eyes' of the robot then saving to an onboard system (the cRIOs flash or an external device) would probably be the best bet.