Use of laptop on robot

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by Binome

I still think that the vision system is not too overly complex for FRC teams.
Your practically given a fully doccumented, sources given example find/track driver, that gives you the current size and posisition of the blob thats precalibrated for the green light.

As a rookie programmer, with absolutely no FRC controller experiance, I had the camera dumping useful information on the second day I had my hands on the controller.

Our team did not implement a successful auto mode, simply due to time contraints and lack of forethought for feedback mechanisms. This is what appears to plauge most teams that had no auto mode. It's not the hardware. The CMUcam is ideal for the scenerio that teams were given last year. The software is extremely powerful, yet abstract enough that programmers do not have to worry about manually deciphering the datastream coming out of the camera. It's precalibrated... I don't understand why people are so angry with it.

I'll agree, provided that FIRST actually gave teams a reasonable chance to actually debug during practice rounds. We had the vision system semi-working for Aim High. I say semi because on the practice field it would home on the light, aim the turret, and spin up the shooter to the proper speed to hit shots dead on. Sadly once it was on the field, it simply wouldn't recognize the light or anything. If we could have actually monitored the debug port during a practice round I'm sure we could've had it working perfectly.