SmartDashboard not streaming from M206

[STarr]

We observed the same behavior. If we did anything to lower the camera frame rate, we'd never see the picture on the (smart) dashboard, just the empty rectangle. We did enough debugging to find that some part of the video stream decoding was reporting a timeout error. It appeared to be timing out if it took more than 33mS to capture a frame.

We replaced the netbook with an new notebook (i5-2430 core, lots of RAM) and saw the same behavior.

Eventually, we gave up on the video issues and the frequent crashes (probably due to the reported bug about exchanging C++ double-precision values) and wrote our own dashboard app in Visual Studio Express that could display video streams from both the forward- and backward-facing cameras on the robot and a targeting overlay for the drivers. (That code is freely available on our Google Code site; contact me directly if you're interested.)

-Steve Tarr, team 1425 mentor