LifeCam USBCamera changing settings from Java

[ahartnet]

Originally Posted by robert1356

Were you able to get a good DARK image, or just an image that is good for a driver to look at? I want a DARK image that a driver would find unusable, but the image processing will be very happy about (because the retro-reflectors will show up nicely).

It was dark enough that I don't anticipate GRIP having a problem with it - based on configuring the settings similarly with the USB camera is plugged in to the laptop.

Using the microsoft software linked to in the other thread, it was very obvious that the camera can be set up to change a lot more than we have access to with the class. I could turn the autofocus off, mess with the white balance, and all sorts of things that were useful in making the retroreflective tape pop even more. Unfortunately, I think we'll be limited to creating a good vision processing filter with just the brightness modified, though I'm going to keep messing with the exposure. But I am seeing the same thing you are - changing the exposure doesn't seem to have any affect, in fact at one point that camera stopped updating and I had no idea until I waved my hand in front of it to test something else.

Good to know it's just a wrapper...might be more investigating to do with the IMAQ functions.

[robert1356]

Originally Posted by ahartnet

Using the microsoft software linked to in the other thread, it was very obvious that the camera can be set up to change a lot more than we have access to with the class. I could turn the autofocus off, mess with the white balance, and all sorts of things that were useful in making the retroreflective tape pop even more.

Was this running on the roboRIO or on your desktop PC? What microsoft software?

[ahartnet]

https://www.microsoft.com/hardware/e...ifecam-hd-3000 was the software - with the camera plugged into the laptop. The settings did not appear to get saved to the camera much as you saw from the webcam settings panel.

[medofbr]

Thanks for posting this code. One question that I have is how can you use GRIP when you have this code running in the robot. We have included similar code to turn off auto white balance and to turn off auto exposure in Java using the USB camera class. However, we have found that GRIP will not run if we have opened the USB camera in our java robot code. So then we tried closing the camera when we were done setting up the camera, but it seems like it does not retain the settings in this case. Is there some way to change the settings in the USB camera and then run GRIP without losing your changes?