GRIP Axis Camera feed too slow

[Justin Buist]

Personally I'm doubting anybody is going to find GRIP useful on the actual robot. Running GRIP on one of our mentor's Core i7 laptop had it hot to the touch and we were just doing an HSV filter and contour finder. On my own at home it was pegging me at 30% usage which is an awful lot for the given task.

When we actually deployed that pipeline to the RoboRIO we saw something like 75% CPU usage just from GRIP and the actual robot code wanted the other 75%. Load average was 3.3ish which on a dual core machine that's not being I/O bound means you're hitting the CPU too hard and starving the robot process. We quickly ditched the idea of GRIP on the robot and went with just hitting OpenCV directly, borrowing from a lot of work done by team 2168. That's working out quite well.

That said there's a purpose to GRIP yet in that it's really easy to experiment with the provided transformations even on a student computer. Familiarity with that makes it easier to muck with OpenCV directly which also runs splendid on a student computer and doesn't require a RoboRIO.