Multiple Axis Cams?

[Anupam Goli]

I was referring actually to the WLAN receiver on the robot, not the router to broadcast the network.

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Wing

I was referring actually to the WLAN receiver on the robot, not the router to broadcast the network.

The D-Link DAP-1522 router is the wireless networking device on the robot. It's there to "broadcast the network" so your Driver Station (and programming computer) can connect to it. There is no other router, access point, or bridge used in the control system this year.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

As Alan has pointed out the Dlink is your new robot radio and a router thrown in. Take your old linksys home or put it too good use somewhere else. It cannot be on the robot this year.
<R52> One D-Link DAP-1522 is the only permitted mechanism for communicating to and from the ROBOT during the MATCH. All signals must originate from the OPERATOR CONSOLE and/or the Field Management System, and be transmitted to the ROBOT via the official ARENA hardware. No other form of wireless communications shall be used to communicate to, from or within the ROBOT (e.g. radio modems from previous FIRST competitions and Bluetooth devices are not permitted on the ROBOT during competition).

[PhilBot]

My question is: "Is it legal to connect one or more cameras to the D-Link in order for the robot to do image processing from 2 cameras ((either symultaniously (for stereo vision) or independantly (for line/target tracking)"

It's clear that the camera is normally plugged into the cRIO port 2, but is it legal to plug another one into the D-LINK?

I think the cRIO code should be able to access either one (just with different IP addresses).

My reason for a second camera is that there are some VERY COOL camera-based line tracking code examples on NI and I'd love to try them, but I don't want to have to pivot the camera up for Peg tracking.

Phil.

[chris janney]

i am also interested in this question. can someone post quickly

[tutkows1]

Cameras are consider COTs, so yes.

[BEASTistheB2ST]

Sorry, but I am really lost in all of this technological terminology. I believe the answers been hinted at, but not plainly said, so: are we allowed to use more than one camera on are robot, for better viewing of the field, or not? I know people keep talking about a four-input DLink thing, but does that mean we can use up to for cameras? I'm sorry, but I really don't understand!!! I didn't see any other posts about it...

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by BEASTistheB2ST

I know people keep talking about a four-input DLink thing, but does that mean we can use up to for cameras?

The D-Link DAP-1522 is the white "robot radio". It is a network router with four Ethernet ports and a Wi-Fi connection. One of its ports must go to the cRIO. That leaves three ports unclaimed for whatever you want to connect to them. The other port on the cRIO is also available for your use.

If you can figure out how to communicate with them, you can use as many commercial, off-the-shelf cameras as you want on your robot (subject to weight, volume, and budget limitations, of course). An eight-port network switch (does anyone even make "dumb" hubs anymore?) would give you the ability to connect six additional devices.

I don't know what network addresses will be available for you to use during competition. It might be that only a camera connected through the cRIO will be viewable on the Driver Station. In that case, you'll need to find a way to select which camera gets its data forwarded and thus seen on the Dashboard display.

[Anupam Goli]

I finally understand that the white Dlink goes on our robot, sorry that was a goof on my part. And we can use our own custom laptops for the driver station, so we could technically have a mozilla browser open to the ip of the camera, and just make that take up half the screen with the rest of the driver station take up the rest.

[plnyyanks]

reported

[321liftoff]

Has anyone had any success with viewing two cameras on the Driver Station?

We are using LabVIEW. Our setup has two Axis cameras (10.xx.yy.90 and 10.xx.yy.91 addresses) on the D-Link with the cRIO (10.xx.yy.2 address). We can put either of the camera addresses as an input to the "Camera Open" VI in the "Begin". Each camera functions correctly when setup this way.

Our idea is to have the robot send one camera feed, then have the user press a button to switch cameras and start sending the other camera feed. We are only using the cameras for the drivers to get a better view, not to do image processing.

Implementation #1
We put .90 in the Begin code to start sending camera images to the Driver Station. In the Vision processing, we setup some code to run "Camera Close" on the current camera reference and run "Camera Open" on the .91 address when a joystick button is pressed.

When running the code, the camera sends images as normal. When the button is not pressed, the .90 camera continues to send images. When the button press occurs, the "Camera Close" code seems to lock up our program and no images are sent.

We haven't delved too deep into the camera code, but we think that the "Camera Close" code kills the camera's connection to the Driver Station. Can someone confirm?

Implementation#2
Another idea is to modify the driver station and have a webbrowser view the camera feed and we could switch between camera feeds on the dashboard. We think this implementation would be technically feasible and would actually provide a better image for the team. It would also take the cRIO out of the imaging loop. Is viewing the Axis camera by webbrowser instead of through the cRIO/Dashboard interface allowed by the rules? Will sending the camera data by this method consume too much bandwidth for the Field Management System?

[elbuo]

Have you tried this already?

I think method #1 would be the way to go. Just don't close the camera before the end and you will be fine.

[apalrd]

If you dig deep enough into the camera VI's, you will see that it gets the image over HTTP from the camera. If you find the right VI's (WPI_CameraIsssue HTTP Request With Authentication.vi and WPI_CameraRead JPG.vi especially), you can make copies of them (with different names) in your code folder, modify them all to call the correct copy, and use them on the Dashboard to get the image directly from the camera.

If you had WPI_CameraIssue HTTP Request With Authentication.vi, WPI_CameraRead JPG.vi, and WPI_CameraDecodeJPEGString.vi, you could get the image as a LabVIEW image and use it just like any other part of the Dashboard.

This would require that both cameras were directly connected to the D-Link router, and not the cRio. It would probably be faster than running through the cRio anyway. Since all communications to the camera happens on port 80, it is allowed by the field.

Super important note: The cRio would have no control of the cameras at all. The Dashboard information packet would have to include which camera to use.

[321liftoff]

Thanks for the detail! Here's what we ended up implementing:

We put a webpage window on the dashboard using code from Labview's Example Finder: see the link here. We created two html files, one for each camera, using the htmlcode provided by Axis to connect to the camera video feed over http. I used the code from the link above because it removed all text and borders around the video feed. We put a switch in the dashboard code to switch between these two html files within the one webpage window, causing the video feed to switch. The quality is definitely better than that of the feed provided by cRIO processing.

Using the existing VIs, as you suggest, to get the images may be a simpler solution because you don't have to mess with managing html files separate from the Labview dashboard code.

[Anupam Goli]

I was actually thinking of just running a firefox window in the background with a laptop of resolution 1920 x 1080, but i knew that probably wouldn't take me far.