Vision... what? how?

[Tom Line]

Most vision systems take a 'shot' of their target, calculate what changes need to be made to aim directly at it, and then have the robot perform those actions.

As a result, well written vision code takes almost no processing power, since you only really need one good frame to make all your calculations. That means that the cRIO can easily handle vision processing. Press your trigger to fire, camera takes a shot, turret or drivetrain aims, then your robots fire.

If you're talking about real-time vision processing, then your best bet is your driverstation laptop. The camera can stream video directly to the laptop, then you can return your targetting data to the cRIO using network tables.

I will tell that after 4 years of writing vision code, we still haven't managed to write one that is more accurate and faster than an experienced robot operator. Don't get too bogged down in the coolness factor of vision. It's nice, but it isn't really needed for most games and the complexity level is quite high when you try to use it.

You can find frc vision examples written for the cRIO in the Help or Support section of LabVIEW if you want to go that route. They are already configured to detect the targets for the given year's game.