Axis camera settings.

[Wildcats1378]

Hey guys,

Our team was wondering how many cameras could be used on the robot? I'm sure it's in the rules somewhere, but we must have missed it.

Also, I'm having trouble getting the camera to work. I had it setup for our system before the competition (Our robotics team is completely brand new this year, no one from last year) but it's not working with the new software.
What do I have to do to get it to work? starting from scratch is fine.


Thanks!

[ebarker]

There is a section in "Getting Started with the 2012 FRC Control System" that explains how to setup the camera.

Also in your NI Labview 2011 on your pc menu is an application that will configure the camera. Or you can setup the camera using a web based login to the camera. Go read "Getting Started with the 2012 FRC Control System"


Different problem - we configure our camera to 10.13.11.11 but it will lose the setting when we powerfail the camera ???? help

[Spark Engineer]

You are not alone. The camera AXIS 206 we used last year in 2011 competition.No issues and worked fine. Now with the new 2012 images and software updates we are unable to get the camera to display on the driver station. It is not a configuration issue for we have used the camera configuration tool, set up the camera to robot radio and also for the cRIO ENET port 2. If we do get it going it does not display images after power reboot. Seems like a FRC software bug to me. Anyone have any insight to this issue? The camera does display on the web browser when logging on to it and it does display in the LabVIEW Vision Assistant 2011.

[Greg McKaskle]

The 4 slot cRIO has a single enet port and the 8 slot has 2 isolated ports. Fortunately, the DLink radio/switch on the robot has 4 ports.

So, the default setup for all robots is now to plug the camera into the DLink along with all of the other enet devices, and set all of them to the 10.te.am.xx address range. The cameras are expected to be in the range of 11 - 20, and the default dashboard EXE assumes .11, as does the default framework code for the robot code.

If you are going to use port 2 of the cRIO, you will need to run the code on the cRIO that replicates images from one port to the other, change the code of the dashboard, and specify the camera IP in your robot code. But this will work, at least for LV. I haven't tested the other languages.

Greg McKaskle

[DjScribbles]

To save people the hunt:
Getting Started with the 2012 FRC Control System

[LanceK]

Our camera (Axis 206) seems to lose its IP settings, but not go back to default whenever we use the LabView 2011 "Setup Axis Camera" tool. We tried bypassing the Labview setup tool and using the internal web browser tool of the camera to set the IP setting for our team. That worked for basic operation, but the camera would still not work with LabView Vision Assistant.

The behavior of the camera when we use the LabView setup tool is as follows:

- Camera works with the Driver Station and LabView Vision Assistant immediately after using the Labview Setup Axis Camera tool, but before power cycling.
- After power cycling the camera, the lights on the front stay orange for a long time (about 5 minutes).
- Eventually the camera lights turn green, but we are unable to find the camera at any IP address. Even if we put the camera on a router with a DHCP server, it still does not get an IP address that we can detect.
- We have to do a hard reset to get the camera back.

Bottom Line: We would like to be able to use the camera with the LabView vision assistant software, but the LabView camera setup tool seems to mess up some settings in the camera. Any advice would be helpful.

Thanks,
Lance Kasari
Team 753 Mentor

[sand500]

I havent found a rule on the number of Cameras yet.
Like others have said, its probably best to look at the getting started documents for the camera.

We are using java for our robot and with the way we have it set up, we can have the camera connected directly to the dlink

[rclothier]

We are having the same problem with the camera losing it's IP address every time we cycle the power. We have to reset the IP every time. If anyone knows how to fix this, my programmer person would be extremely happy.

[rclothier]

Ah hah! Found a procedure that worked on the "Axis Camera Err." thread. The IP doesn't disappear on powerdown now. Definitely have to set the IP's manually, instead of using the automatic tool.

[Greg McKaskle]

I believe the following URL links to a patched utility.

https://decibel.ni.com/content/message/31018

Greg McKaskle

[Mr. Lim]

Originally Posted by LanceK

Our camera (Axis 206) seems to lose its IP settings, but not go back to default whenever we use the LabView 2011 "Setup Axis Camera" tool. We tried bypassing the Labview setup tool and using the internal web browser tool of the camera to set the IP setting for our team. That worked for basic operation, but the camera would still not work with LabView Vision Assistant.

The behavior of the camera when we use the LabView setup tool is as follows:

- Camera works with the Driver Station and LabView Vision Assistant immediately after using the Labview Setup Axis Camera tool, but before power cycling.
- After power cycling the camera, the lights on the front stay orange for a long time (about 5 minutes).
- Eventually the camera lights turn green, but we are unable to find the camera at any IP address. Even if we put the camera on a router with a DHCP server, it still does not get an IP address that we can detect.
- We have to do a hard reset to get the camera back.

Bottom Line: We would like to be able to use the camera with the LabView vision assistant software, but the LabView camera setup tool seems to mess up some settings in the camera. Any advice would be helpful.

Thanks,
Lance Kasari
Team 753 Mentor

Edit: This is likely the problem described in posts above RE: Issues with the Axis Camera Setup Utility. Try Greg's patched Setup Utility above first.

My original, less useful solution follows:

Is your camera mounted on a plate or post?

If you've mounted your camera on something, make sure the reset button on the back of the camera isn't being pushed by anything.

I've done this more times than I can remember...

...to the point where I've glued washers around the reset button to make sure it can't be pressed accidentally.

[LanceK]

I'm not at the camera right now, so I can't try the patched utility, but one of our students found out how to get the camera to work with Vision Assistant by using the manual web setup method. She created a user with the name FRC and password FRC. Apparently the Vision Assistant logs into the camera with this user account. That fixed our problem.

I will have one of the students try the patched utility just so we know that both methods work.

Thanks for the help.