Camera did not work for well at the regionals, but worked great at home.

[Alan Ing]

Hi all,

Our season is over for us having gone to two regionals (SCR & Sacremento)this year and we had a great time. Now that the season is over for us, I was wondering if everyone might help us figure out what we did wrong with the camera.

Our programing team spent a lot of hours modifying the default code to aim our turret (both pan and tilt) and it worked great at home. I was amazed how quickly the camera acquired the target light and adjusted our turret for both pan and tilt even while the robot was moving and turning. At home, we can nail the goal from just about anywhere on the field from half court all the way to front. All of this was done using the default settings for the camera in one of the High School's auditoriums.

At the competition it was a completely different story. Our Camera had an incredibly hard time finding the target at all. We brought our target light with us and in the pit the camera could track the light, but not as well as it should have. It often locked on to the overhead lights in the pits. On the competition floor, it rarely could find the target and just kept searching making our shooter very ineffective.

Any ideas what went wrong and how to correct it? I was hoping that the default settings would work at all the regionals but for us that didn't happen.
After a whole regional and two matches, we eventually took the camera completely off and went to 100% manual control and started doing a lot better.

Did anyone else run into the same problem? Could they solve it at the regionals?

I am mainly the mechanical mentor for the team so I don't claim to know the program.

If other teams had trouble with the default settings at the competition, I'd like to know.

If it is a problem, perhaps FIRST might be able to find the optimal settings for each regional as it is very difficult to dial in the settings during practice sessions. Or perhaps they could let us on the side of the field during other teams practice sessions so we can dial in the settings while under the competition lights and using the actual targets.

By the way, I do think FIRST made a very good attempt with the camera this year. Just need to work it out a bit more so that more teams can be successful with it.

Regards,
Alan Ing
Engineering Mentor
Team 368
Honolulu, Hawaii