Camera image and Network Tables

[Mark McLeod]

Typically, the Driver Station laptop requests a video stream directly from the IP camera.
A working example is in the default Dashboard project.

[Greg McKaskle]

Yes, you don't really want or need to put entire images into network tables.

The dashboard and LV framework code support a number of ways to get images from robot to dashboard.

If using an Axis IP camera, configure it,plug it into the robot radio, and on the dashboard choose IP on the camera selector. The communication is direct between dashboard and camera and the roboRIO isn't even involved.

If using a USB camera, plug it into the roboRIO and choose between the USB SW or USB HW. Both should work, and the primary difference is the configurability and CPU usage tradeoff.

If you then want to process images on the roboRIO, the Vision Processing VI can be modified to also request images from the camera and process them. The resulting data, likely coordinates, distance, etc. are the type of data you'd want to send through network tables.

Greg McKaskle