Ethernet Camera not on Dashboard

[Greg McKaskle]

The three buttons on the dashboard are for recording, stopping, and playing back recorded match info including video. You do not need to use them to get the camera to display. You will need to select between the different camera options which are...

Camera Off -- no request is made to the server on the roboRIO or directly to a camera

USB Camera SW -- the USB camera is configured to return uncompressed images which are then compressed by the roboRIO for transmission. This allows for full control over compression and bandwidth usage, but requires the roboRIO CPU to do the compression of the stream, and it may not achieve the framerate.

USB Camera HW -- the USB camera is configured to return compressed images and these are directly sent back to the DB. Smaller load on CPU, typically higher framerate, but no control over compression value.

IP Camera -- the request goes directly to the camera. No roboRIO involvement at all.

There are a few common reasons why the camera will not show up on the dashboard. For IP cameras, the most common issues are that the camera has not been configured with the FRC/FRC account or the DNS name has not been set. Alternatively, you can use the IP address on a custom dashboard.

For USB cameras, the connection must go to the roboRIO, and for that, the DB must know the IP address. I would suggest installing the update that was pushed last week. We would sometimes see that the TCP connection between the DB and DS would fail. Without this, the default DB will not know how to contact the robot. Also, the ini files for the DB were updated to force socket reuse without the sixty second timeout. Both of these should make the camera connection more reliable.

If the update doesn't make it more reliable, I'd suggest building the DB from source and debugging its diagram. The bottom of loop 1 receives and updates the IP addresses of the robot and camera from the DS. A probe of that wire will tell you whether the DB has enough information to start.

Greg McKaskle