Using cameras

[Peter Johnson]

We placed the camera just under the bumper / above the intake in 2010, only sending the result to the driver station (it wasn't used for anything on the robot). It was definitely useful for finding balls hidden behind bumps that year, since we often played the middle and back, and balls (as Murphy would predict) tended to roll right where you couldn't see them!

Interesting factoid: the camera was mounted upside down so it didn't interfere with our pincher. There's a setting in the camera to flip the image for you, so we didn't even have to do that in code anywhere.

We used a custom dashboard to display the camera image (it's posted somewhere on CD), not the labview one, which gave us a near-realtime 30 fps view at the driver station.