HD-3000 camera has wasted many hours

[Dinokaiz2]

Originally Posted by Ozuru

What was your issue? Setting the exposure time is simply USBCamera.setExposureManual(val).

The Microsoft LifeCam HD-3000 doesn't support having it's exposure set in this manner.

Originally Posted by wt200999

Can you explain the issues you've had?

We've had 0 problems with exposure control on the HD-3000 camera, and are actually quite happy with it so far.

From personal experience and research, I think that the LifeCam doesn't preserve its settings after a power cycle, and, because you can't configure the settings from the RIO, it makes it difficult to have a configured camera on a robot. Usually. Some people, probably including you, wt200999, seem to have LifeCams that just work. They preserve their settings after a power cycle where other LifeCams would not. After hours of digging through Google search results, I haven't found the reason why.


OP -- The way our team solved the problem was by plugging the LifeCam into a Raspberry Pi 2, where we were able to configure its settings live using v4l2. We, however, didn't stream that camera to the dashboard, instead choosing to keep the stream on the Pi for vision processing.

[kmckay]

Originally Posted by Dinokaiz2

The Microsoft LifeCam HD-3000 doesn't support having it's exposure set in this manner.



From personal experience and research, I think that the LifeCam doesn't preserve its settings after a power cycle, and, because you can't configure the settings from the RIO, it makes it difficult to have a configured camera on a robot. Usually. Some people, probably including you, wt200999, seem to have LifeCams that just work. They preserve their settings after a power cycle where other LifeCams would not. After hours of digging through Google search results, I haven't found the reason why.

Its more erratic than that. I conducted several trials today:
1. Restarted robot code from dashboard - Settings lost
2. Reset settings, power cycled robot, loaded new code - Settings lost
3. Reset settings, plugged back into rio without power cycle - settings lost
4. Did not reset settings, restarted rio from dashboard - settings worked (note, these were settings from before trial 3 that didn't show after trial 3)
5. Restart robot code from dashboard - settings worked
6. Restart RIO from button on rio - settings worked
7. Load new code - settings worked
8. Hard power cycle (turn power switch off/on) - settings worked

If anyone has example code using USBCamera successfully, it would be greatly appreciated.

[wt200999]

We've eliminated these issues by always writing the camera settings to the camera when the code starts.

We do this with a csv file that has a list of all the attributes that we care about stored on the roboRIO. When the code loads we loop through each setting and set the camera accordingly.

The list of attributes and the list for the csv I have saved in a google doc here. Each tab has some different info, the 'optimal settings' I listed is for the vision tracking and not good for viewing. The 'Values for CSV' tab is a copy of the actual csv file that we send to the robot.

I've attached the LabVIEW code we used, I do not know the equivalent IMAQ function, but it may give you an idea.