Video Camera for Java

[toadoncart]

Hey All,

Our team's robot uses an AXIS video camera and it's been very laggy. My coach says i's because the router is getting signals from both the camera and the computer. Has anybody else had problems like this before?

Also, I wanted to customize the video camera view on the computer so that there is a little "box" or arrow that centers at where I'm shooting at. It's kind of like your typical shooting game where you have that little cursor looking thing that shows where you're aiming. Is that possible? We plan on adjusting the box thing to eventually cover the target area since our shooter is going to stay at a fixed inclination. Our team's programming is done on Java.

If anybody has experience doing this kind of stuff, please help us out! Thanks!

[Alan Anderson]

If the frame rate is too high, the image will lag. At 30 fps, we see nearly a second of delay between something moving in the camera's field of view and the image showing that motion. At 10 fps, there is no significant lag at all.

The Dashboard is programmed in LabVIEW. You can create a new Dashboard project and customize it however you like. There is no problem putting a crosshair image, or rectangles, or text, or whatever you like, on the video display. Look in the Vision and Motion >> Vision Utilities >> Overlay function subpalette for things that you can insert between the existing IMAQ Clear Overlay function in the Dashboard image loop and the indicator for the image.

The Axis camera also supports an in-camera overlay feature. I've never used it, so I don't have detailed instructions for you. Basically, you create a picture and send it to the camera with appropriate settings. The camera will add that picture on top of whatever it sends back as an image.

[Negative 9]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

If the frame rate is too high, the image will lag. At 30 fps, we see nearly a second of delay between something moving in the camera's field of view and the image showing that motion. At 10 fps, there is no significant lag at all.

The Dashboard is programmed in LabVIEW. You can create a new Dashboard project and customize it however you like. There is no problem putting a crosshair image, or rectangles, or text, or whatever you like, on the video display. Look in the Vision and Motion >> Vision Utilities >> Overlay function subpalette for things that you can insert between the existing IMAQ Clear Overlay function in the Dashboard image loop and the indicator for the image.

The Axis camera also supports an in-camera overlay feature. I've never used it, so I don't have detailed instructions for you. Basically, you create a picture and send it to the camera with appropriate settings. The camera will add that picture on top of whatever it sends back as an image.

Is there a way to program the dashboard using Java?

[Greg McKaskle]

Absolutely, it is called SmartDashboard and available from WPILib.

Greg McKaskle