Legal Cameras

[EricH]

#1: Don't assume anything about next year's rules until next January. (I hear that you won't be allowed to use sensors of any sort next year.)

#2: Using Adobe's find feature on Section 8, I find the following in the 2010 rules:
<R45-C> If a 5V camera is used (such as the KOP camera), the camera power feed must be connected to the 5 Vdc supply terminals on the Power Distribution Board.

Note that it does not say "the KOP camera must be used". Also see <R32>.

Note that a camera would fall under "custom circuit" rules for those purposes.

And now, for the bonus part: the FRC Q&A says: legal, and legal to have a different camera.

Noting that the Axis 206 is discontinued, pick a camera and have fun.

[kamocat]

Also note that this only applies to 5v cameras. I have here a 12v IP camera (Zonet ZVC7611). The image capturing software does indeed work with it, however, make sure to create an account it can access pictures through. (FRC, FRC is the first one it tries)

[EHaskins]

I believe several teams are using Axis M1011 cameras with the default code.

[Greg McKaskle]

When looking at cameras to use on the robot, one factor that is kinda hard to measure is the latency. If your camera takes a quarter second to give you the pixels, your robot will live a quarter second in the past. One of the benefits of the Axis cameras was that they happened to be pretty low latency for the price. The camera market is changing all the time, and I'd love to hear selections others have made. Please try to make a latency measurement if possible.

Greg McKaskle

[tutkows1]

Thanks!
Our camera had an unforcenet meeting with our kicker last year and i have been in a quest to find a replacement, but i will wait until next years manual comes out before i buy on.

On another note, i hope they keep the custom circuits on the second Ethernet port somewhat open because i what to have two cameras and a network switch for tracking software that can give a somewhat accurate range.

[tutkows1]

What latency do you experience with the Zonet ZVC7611 camera?

[kamocat]

Originally Posted by tutkows1

What latency do you experience with the Zonet ZVC7611 camera?

Hmm, it appears I have spoken too soon.
I was going to do a latency measurement similar to how Greg Mckaskle did it a while back (using the LEDs on the cRIO).
However, I'm having trouble getting the cRIO to create a TCP connection with the camera.
The camera does work on my computer. (As far as I can tell, you can only capture jpegs, not cgi images, so it does require slight modification to the camera software. What I've done is just use the "get image" inline in my code, instead of having it asynchronous.

Of course, I'm not one to just send the image back to the driver station.)
So, i'll get a latency measurement once I get it working. Sorry about that.

EDIT:
I got it working now. There were just some troubles with IP address.
The latency is around 400ms on a small image image (175 x 144), 500ms on medium (320 x 240), and 550ms on large (640 x 480). These values may vary by at least 100ms each way. It's a cheap camera.
Here's a screenshot of the latency test:

(When the case is FALSE, it just passes the data through)

[qnetjoe]

More than likely the camera will have to be supported by NI's IMAQdx driver. Currently only Bassler and AXIS camera's are supported. The camera would have to be a fast ethernet (aka 10/100), as the cRIO-FRC does not have any gigabit ethernet port like other CompatRIOs

Here is a small portion from the following link

Driver used: IMAQdx 3.5 - installed with Vision Acquisition Software November 2009.
No framegrabber required. Images are processed onboard.

National Instruments supports Internet Protocol (IP) cameras manufactured by Basler and Axis. IP cameras are the only type of cameras currently supported by the Compact RIO. An IP camera typically sends a compressed image over an ethernet connection. Axis IP cameras must have firmware version 2.0 (or later) to be supported.

The big question to ask is would another camera help? Personally I don't think as the vision processing is CPU limited and there is only so much we can get out of a 400Mhz processor.

Just for reference I am able to process 7-8 fps (125-166ms) at 320x240with an AXIS 206.

[Greg McKaskle]

The FRC camera lobs doesn't currently use the IMAQdx driver. They added support for Axis after WPILib was released. The camera support is straight tcp.

Greg McKaskle