Vision Tracking Assistance

[Greg McKaskle]

I'd recommend you read through one of the vision white papers published for FIRST.

Both IP and USB cameras will work. Here are the high level trade-offs.

USB web cameras are less expensive, powered over USB, often harder to mechanically mount, somewhat less configurable acquisition.

IP cameras have built-in and configurable compression. This is an aid if you primarily want the images to be sent to the dashboard. This introduces artifacts if you primarily want to process the images.

USB cameras can require additional roboRIO CPU resources if you want to send the video stream to the dashboard. If you use the "USB Camera SW" option, the images are converted to jpeg on roboRIO. If you use the "USB Camera HW' option, the camera produces the compressed version, though its compression settings are not adjustable. This is, at least, how those settings affect the LV robot framework.

Greg McKaskle