paper: How to Get Multiple Cameras on Robot

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by techhelpbb

Easy if you use USB webcams like we did with a laptop on the robot.
You can easily put 2 webcams on a laptop, sometimes 3 (depends really on the number of root hubs in the laptop, most netbooks have 3 USB ports but only 2 root hubs).

If you use a MultiTT USB hub you can usually get to 3.

We can confirm that putting a laptop within the rule restrictions is allowed and has passed inspection at 3 competitions.

It's quite cost effective as well. Consider how much 3 of those Axis cameras would cost versus the $25 webcams.

You can get 1080P webcams now. Think about what you could do what that sort of resolution. Think about what you could do with 45-50 frames a second from some webcams at 640x480.

This whitepaper is documenting how to attach a second camera and add it to the driverstation display. In this game, likely as a POV camera for ball hunting. As described in the whitepaper, this takes about 30 minutes or less of programming, and no particular expertise.

So I fail to see how adding an entire laptop with USB cameras is a more economical solution to this problem. (Axis cameras are about $125, by the way. Is that a $200 laptop?) And then there's the complication of the custom code on your laptop and interfacing that to the code on the driverstation to display the video from the cameras.

So, while a secondary laptop for image processing is a nifty idea, I don't think it has any relevance whatsoever to this (rather good) whitepaper.