Wierd search behavior....

[Salik Syed]

okay when the camera is in search mode it usually tilts up goes through one left right cycle, goes to a middle point scans left and right, then pans down and scans left and right... now recently it just tilts up while facing towards the right, then tilts back down to middle and scans left/right ... effectively it never tilts except when at the far far right and even then only up not down...!

what can explain this wierd behavior? serial port stuff perhaps? i can't figure it out...

[DanDon]

Originally Posted by Salik Syed

okay when the camera is in search mode it usually tilts up goes through one left right cycle, goes to a middle point scans left and right, then pans down and scans left and right... now recently it just tilts up while facing towards the right, then tilts back down to middle and scans left/right ... effectively it never tilts except when at the far far right and even then only up not down...!

what can explain this wierd behavior? serial port stuff perhaps? i can't figure it out...

It might be that you camera is catching a glimpse of something within the color range, and then losing track, thus restarting the search cycle.

When this happens, watch if the red light on the camera turns on when at the upper right corner. If so, then what I said above is probably happening.

Try covering up everything that is either reflective, or can be within the allowed color range for tracking.

Hope this helps,

[JamesBrown]

we had the same problem, it ended up being a glitch in the search routine, check and make sure you didn't mix up any = and == we ended up just rewriting ours.

[Windward]

We had a similar problem, except we had the servos on the mount attached wrong so they weren't center. AKA the camera wasn't mounted properly for the search values. Try taking off the camera from the servos, assuming your using the defualt value, and recentering it.

[Denz]

To fix this, we changed in tracking.c under the search routine

//temp_pan_servo = 0; temp_pan_servo = (int)PAN_SERVO;
//temp_tilt_servo = TILT_CENTER_PWM_DEFAULT;
temp_tilt_servo = (int)TILT_SERVO;

this worked well as a fix, the default values are commented out.

[Eldarion]

Just as a possibility, when ours spazzed out like that for no apparent reason, I found that the lens had been screwed all the way down by the vibration!

When the camera is way out of focus like that, very wierd things start to happen

[Denz]

Put some tape around that lens ! Our bot vibrated so much, we had to locktite all the screws around the camera, cuz they kept falling out, but it still stayed in focus!

[Eldarion]

Originally Posted by Denz

Put some tape around that lens ! Our bot vibrated so much, we had to locktite all the screws around the camera, cuz they kept falling out, but it still stayed in focus!

That's what we ended up doing.

Safety Inspector: What is this electrical tape doing here?
Me: It's insulating the lens!