camera trouble,cant tell the green-light from regular white light

[Nimmy]

our programming team has been working all week on the camera
and they can't seem to be able to tell apart the green light we got
for FRC from the regular light from lightbullbs in the room,
we tried it from diffrent distances but the green-light seems to just
be so powerful that the camera gets "blinded" by it and sees it as white

anyone else have this problem?
is it possible our green-light is to powerful? thanks in advance

(sorry for typos, in a hurry)

[Rick TYler]

(Rick whacks his head with the flat of his hand several times.)

I can't quite remember this conversation, but I think this is pretty close:

At the Seattle Robotic Society's Robothon event I was talking to the builder of the winner of the Robo-Magellan competition. This involved an autonomous robot covering rough ground outdoors to a goal. He mentioned that he finally had to put a filter over his CMU cam to make it work properly. Here is the part my memory fades on. I THINK he said that the camera was being oversaturated by UV light, and that adding a *framistat* level UV filter, it worked much better. Unfortunately I don't remember his name or the nature of the filter. One of our mentors is a SRS regular, I'll ask him if he knows how to find this out.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

[Kevin Watson]

Originally Posted by Nimmy

our programming team has been working all week on the camera
and they can't seem to be able to tell apart the green light we got
for FRC from the regular light from lightbullbs in the room,
we tried it from diffrent distances but the green-light seems to just
be so powerful that the camera gets "blinded" by it and sees it as white

anyone else have this problem?
is it possible our green-light is to powerful? thanks in advance

(sorry for typos, in a hurry)

You should try loading the camera.hex file from either of the .zip archives and see if it works. The default calibration parameters should work just fine if you're using the official FIRST green light.

-Kevin

[Phreakuency]

I believe that the reason is that the wavelengths are close enough that it is causing the camera to detect them as the same color. This could either be due to the wavelengths as I said before, or it could be due to a setting in the camera. What I am going to try when I get ahold of the camera again is I am going to dump the camera settings into a text file and I will try to find either a contast setting or jumper, or a good filter type.
I should be able to get back to you by saturday or sunday, if I fnd anything earlier, I will let you all know.
Sincerely,
Phreakuency

[Nimmy]

thanks guys, ill update my programming about the camera.hex
and see about that UV filter

is there a chance that the light is to bright for the camera
if we take out one of the green lights (or 2) will it make the green light
less bright? or will it then not catch it in the competition?

I was also thinking to put a layer of some whitish plastic on the light to make it less bright,

the problem is when we "grab image" and then select the green light
it highlights the greenlight and also highlights any other strong lights in the area (fire escape light for example)
it also shows the light in the RGB as green:240 blue:240, the red varies
but it is a high number

however in the edge of the green light, the green is more strong then the other colours, still not good for us though.

I will check back on saturday-sunday also

have a good weekend guys thanks

[Matt Krass]

How are you powering the light? We're using a 12 volt Robot battery and its just the right brightness.

[Andrew Blair]

I think that the problem lies with camera exposure values. Somehow, if you don't want to use Kevin's code, you have to adjust the exposure settings so thats its dim enough that it can distinguish.

[ahecht]

Originally Posted by Nimmy

I was also thinking to put a layer of some whitish plastic on the light to make it less bright.

The light should have a sheet of whitish plastic mounted in front of it. There was a piece of HDPE in the kit (shrinkwrapped with the cold cathodes) that is designed to be used as a diffuser.

[AV_guy007]

Originally Posted by ahecht

The light should have a sheet of whitish plastic mounted in front of it. There was a piece of HDPE in the kit (shrinkwrapped with the cold cathodes) that is designed to be used as a diffuser.

thats how ours is set up but we still have the same problem

[devicenull]

Take a loot at the workbook here, page 6-7.. it tells you exactly how to fix that problem. (Or you can copy the values from the default code to the GUI and see how that works)

[Smithvillefirst]

I am Anthony Peck from team1806 and My camera is not working properly the camera has Inverted Servos and WILL NOT be changed via jumpers, Is it fried?

[Dman]

I am also having the same trouble with the camera. The pan servo works correctly, but the tilt is inverted. I have tried repeatedly to use the jumper on the board to invert the tilt axis, but to no avail. Any advice in this matter will be greatly appreciated.

[b_mallerd]

Mayb you just put in the pan servo upside down? Is the arm coming out of it closer to the top?

Just a suggestion...

[Eldarion]

Originally Posted by Dman

I am also having the same trouble with the camera. The pan servo works correctly, but the tilt is inverted. I have tried repeatedly to use the jumper on the board to invert the tilt axis, but to no avail. Any advice in this matter will be greatly appreciated.

Do you have the servos connected to the camera's on-board servo drivers? If so, the tilt jumper is not the jumper identified in the instructions. To reverse the tilt, short the jumper marked as pan in the instructions.

If the servos are hooked up to the RC, just change the code

[Kevin Watson]

Originally Posted by Smithvillefirst

I am Anthony Peck from team1806 and My camera is not working properly the camera has Inverted Servos and WILL NOT be changed via jumpers, Is it fried?

What exactly do you mean by inverted? Are you using the pan/tilt mechanism from the kit of parts?

-Kevin