Camera on cRIO

[UIA]

Hi, i am a student from Norway who found this forum thro google. We are curently doing a prodject on an atonmous robot.

We are using a CompactRIO as a controll unit. And we need to have a vision system, but we can not afford the camera module from NI. Does anybody here have som experince with using a serial conectet camera on the cRIO? Or is there another alternativ? I found another thread abaot some people using an axis camera, would that be a good alterantiv?

[Alan Anderson]

The standard camera for the FIRST Robotics Competition is the Axis M1011. Its predecessor, the Axis 206, was chosen because it has very little lag in the image. It's an Ethernet camera, with images retrieved using HTTP. I think it's a very good option for a cRIO-connected camera.

[UIA]

ok thanks

But this image can be used for image processing in labview right?

Our plan is to use the cammera to determine the robots position using three referenc points. Each refrenc point have to IR-diode`s. We wil determine the distance to each point by counting the pixels between the upper and lower diode and then calculate the distance uising trigonomteri.

excuse my bad english

[FrankJ]

Is the camera module the software that analyzes the image or the camera itself?

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by UIA

But this image can be used for image processing in labview right?

Yes. Many FRC teams do it, and some do it very well.

Here's a link to a document on the National Instruments Developer Zone that you might find useful.

[Greg McKaskle]

You have several ways to access the camera. The Axis camera and a number of other IP cameras are supported by the IMAQdx drivers, but FRC actually uses TCP to directly request an MJPG stream and to configure the camera. The Axis website contains very good documentation for the VAPIX API. You could also use the FRC camera library as it has no dependencies I can think of on other FRC libraries.

Greg McKaskle