Able to stream video in competition?

[Patrick Chiang]

I heard that due to bandwidth issues, FIRST is restricting the ports on the router. Would we still be able to "see through" on Labview Dashboard during the competition?

[Alan Anderson]

Dashboard data is part of the unfiltered communication from the robot to the DS. You'll be able to use it during competition.

However, even though the provided Dashboard project uses it, the live camera data is separate from the dashboard data, is blocked by the field network, and will be unavailable.

[Patrick Chiang]

Ah. I see.
Then, can we not pass the video as data and compress it so that it gets to labview? Or would that be impractical?

[popo308]

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

Ah. I see.
Then, can we not pass the video as data and compress it so that it gets to labview? Or would that be impractical?

I read somewhere you can include the camera data with the set user data vi (the allowed 984 bytes)

Can anyone confirm this?

If so how would you include the camera data? My team is also hoping to use it during a match...

[nathanww]

Yep, you have to rewrite the dashboard code but it's doable. As for compression, one strategy I was thinking of would be to simply translate a "high-level summary" back to the dashboard, something along the lines of "trailer here, robot here, wall over there", which is then reconstituted into an approximate visual representation by your dashboard. Depending on what you need it for, this could be blazingly fast

[Patrick Chiang]

I did some reading on this and I saw somewhere that it's actually quite doable with medium resolution and around 20fps. That will actually be extremely helpful if you are going to depend on your video to drive around. The only problem is going to be reprogramming your dashboard.

[Greg McKaskle]

I think you should redo the math. The entire allowance is ~1kbytes per packet and fifty packets per second, so 50k/sec. From what I remember, the jpegs at medium are around 20k each.

Also keep in mind that the upload is going to chop the images up and recombine them. Your images to the dashboard are already lagged by perhaps 0.5 seconds, and these will be lagging even more. I'm not trying to talk you out of it, just making sure your expectations are not set too high.

Greg McKaskle