USB camera with GRIP or Roborealm

[ThomasClark]

Originally Posted by David Lame

I am obviously missing the point on something. I am not completely alone in missing the point, but some people seem to have gotten it. I (and the students on my team) haven't.

I have seen lots of references to "running grip on the driver station PC".

We can run GRIP on a plain old PC, not running a driver station at the time, by plugging in a web cam, or just using the build in web cam of the laptop. It works great. However, that doesn't help during a match. During a match, I have the USB web cam on the robot, plugged into the roborio. The roborio will acquire the pictures from the USB webcam, and communicate them to the driver station. The only place I have ever seen those pictures displayed is on the smart dashboard. Is there some other place?

Meanwhile, it seems that somehow on the laptop that the drivers are looking at, we are able to run GRIP. If that's what we do, how do we tell GRIP, "Use the webcam on the Roborio as your source."



Or am I missing the boat entirely? When I see people talking about "running GRIP on the driver station pc", do they mean during testing, like we have been doing on the last few days, with sample images in our lab? I assume that "the drive station PC" is the PC that the drivers are staring at during a match, that is controlling and communicating with the robot. If so, how do I get the image from the robot, process it on the driver station PC, and then send the processed information back to the robot. That last part seems to involve network tables, but where does it get the data to process?

Sorry, maybe we haven't been completely clear on how camera streaming works in GRIP and FRC in general.

• You can run GRIP on the driver station PC with a USB or builtin webcam for testing
• You can run GRIP on the driver station PC in actual competition if you use an IP camera (Axis camera), since it can send video over a standard M-JPEG stream. To do this, use the "Add IP Camera" button.
• You cannot currently run GRIP on a driver station with a USB cam plugged into the roboRIO. This is because the roboRIO uses a non-standard protocol to stream data to the dashboard. This protocol is pretty simple, so we might add support for it soon. The reason we haven't yet is mostly because this method is inefficient and results in lower frame rates, but it's also the cheapest method in terms of hardware.