Blacking out Camera's vision freezes robot
I am testing code on our robot for image processing and have found something that is extremely odd. We are trying to follow light reflected off of the retroreflective tape and have a problem of having background light flooding out the picture so we use a black blanket behind the stand for right now.
The problem occurred when the blanket ended up right up against the camera. When it blacked out the camera image, the robot jittered a little and then froze. We could put it into disabled but lights on the robot that are supposed to turn off in disabled mode stayed on. We went to check for errors that came in the messages box on the Diagnostics tab of the driverstation and the driverstation froze on us where we had to close it with Task Manager and re-open it. The robot also would not start working again until we cycled the power on it. If we didn't cycle the power after putting the robot back into disabled, it would do nothing and sit still yet still feed camera images back to the dashboard.
I've gone back through and tested the system and it runs just fine except for when the image returned from the camera is solid black. When this happens, the exact same thing occurs as what I mentioned earlier. I have already gone through to check all the hardware and electrical connections and there is no problem there. I've also checked to see if this happens with any other color and it does. It seems that if the entire image being returned by the camera is just a solid color, that it will crash the camera. The only differences that occurred differently from what was mentioned above is that the camera feed to the dashboard sometimes stops.
Anybody have any idea why this happens? I know that the likelihood of the camera getting covered by something causing the entire image to become a uniform color is slim with the way that we have our camera set up. This just seems to be a VERY odd problem.
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Be careful what you wish for, you just might be asked to be on the committee! - Rosiebotboss [more] 
19-02-2011, 18:00
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