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

[Gdeaver]

The light from some HID lighting can cause problems. As someone mention on an early season post, A lens from sunglasses can improve the camera performance.

[Alan Ing]

Chris, thank you for responding on behalf of our team regarding my question about the camera.

As I mentioned, I'm mainly the mechanical guy and not a programmer.

I really appreciate everyones advice for our team and apparantly there is a lot to be learned when using the camera.

Our programming team did their best to work out problems with the camera before and at the competition. I'm especially proud of their round the clock efforts to adapt our shooter to 100% manual control at the competition.

Being the mechanical guy on the team, it was a bit frustrating watching our performance when you knew that everything was working fine at home, but not at the competition. Mechanical problems (at least for me) are easy to spot and check. This camera thing is a lot harder and it felt like we were guessing too much on how to correct the problem. We put most (not all) of our eggs into this basket and we scrambled to adapt our controls to more effectively shoot in manual only.

I think it would be great if teams who needed to adjust their cameras at the regionals could come up with some sort of document on how they did it. Unfortunately, the short practice sessions don't allow you to just sit with your machine on the actual playing field with a computer and adjust your camera until it works.

Like I said, our camera works perfectly at home and we had a short demo for the local news. Our machine is a completely different animal back home with the camera working. We had a good time at the competition, but I wonder what would have happened if the machine was fully functional

[X-Istence]

Alan Ing: I know that at the NJ regional, one of the judges or support staff that was there went out onto the field before the day started and would check the camera settings, and would pass them onto the pit administration so that teams could check their code, modify it, and get on the field with good values. I never used them, as they seemed to be straight backwards to what I had, and our camera worked perfectly without em.

Maybe this was something that was available at the regional you guys were at, but did not know it?

[Terry Sherman]

We had alot of difficulty at regionals as well until we discovered that for some reason the camera attribute 'noise filter' in our configuration was set to 0. At home this was not a problem. In Ohio they were gracious enough to let us walk on the field with just our camera and our laptop during lunch to figure out was was going on. Thats when we discovered that we were getting 1 to 2 pixels of tracked image for each of the arena lights. Adding up this noise, we met the tolerance condition of 10 pixels and tracked! Once we bumped up our noise filter to 3 we were good to go. I'd suggest trying it!

-Terry