Looking for a reliable and affordable way to calibrate your cameras for 2025? I’m excited to share a new product: Charuco Calibration Targets, designed specifically for teams looking to achieve professional-quality camera calibration without breaking the bank.
Why These Targets?
Flat and Durable: Made from 6mm aluminum composite, these targets stay flat, ensuring consistent and accurate calibration results.
Cost-Effective: Comparable to professional-grade targets but at a fraction of the price, making them accessible for all teams.
Optimized for Photonvision: Built to help you get the best possible performance from your vision systems.
Two Convenient Sizes: Available in 9"x11" ($19) and 20"x20" ($45), so you can choose the perfect fit for your setup.
Whether you’re preparing for competition or refining your vision systems in the offseason, these calibration targets are a simple yet powerful tool to enhance your accuracy and consistency.
Over the summer, I added Charuco calibration support to Photonvision. In doing so, I learned just how crucial it is to have a flat calibration target for optimal results. I quickly realized that high-quality calibration targets are often very expensive—something that’s out of reach for many FIRST teams.
Given my experience working at a company that specializes in large-format 2D printing, I didn’t understand why these targets were priced so high. So, I decided to create a solution: I set up an account at my company to sell these targets to FIRST teams. We just happen to use the same 6mm aluminum composite material as the professional calibration target manufacturers. Using some of the best large-format printers available, these targets are printed on aluminum composite, clear-coated for protection, and CNC router-cut to size.
I would say portability and ease of use are the big ones. During the season we used a laptop, and it was quite hard to get an accurate measurement using calipers, especially without destroying your screen. I would imagine a tablet would be fairly easy to move around, doing it on a laptop was quite awkward. I wouldn’t say that there are any noticeable accuracy improvements.
You can also print these out yourself and just glue them onto a piece of plywood/aluminum/anything-flat if one doesn’t want to deal with bringing a tablet.
Having spent a career in Medical Imaging, multiple decades doing landscape photography and printing, and 10+ years vision tracking in FRC, I can say with 100% certainty that a solid camera calibration tool it invaluable .
Sure, you can print a target and adhere it to wood, coroplast or some other substrate. But, your students will find a way to damage it .
With that said, order placed!
“Flat” can mean a lot of different things depending on who you’re talking to. For example, at my lab last summer we had a 4ft x 4ft chessboard made out of 1in thick aluminum honeycomb
(This is why the monitor hack is so clever - the manufacturing process usually means that they just happen to be flatter than just about anything else you’ve got lying around)
I think a lot of people reading this might undervalue a high quality print on something with an aluminum backing. Will be great for the pit and for our practice field.
Placed my order, will let you know how these work out for us!
Thanks for adding a great product idea to the FRC ecosystem.
Heck, I work for (the parent company of) Vistaprint and I have to say that this is a good price for 6mm ACP and the shipping rate is reasonable as well.
I wouldn’t trust our coroplast lawn signs to stay flat enough for this purpose, so I think this is a way better fit product for the purpose.
That tracks - I was sold on it being metal. In the past I’ve taped an 8x11 piece of paper to a clip board. (which always gets lost) This was a shut up and take my money moment and right on time as I’m ordering in the last of our supplies.
I don’t have any numbers on exact tolerances. They are fairly flat, I put the large target on a granite surface plate and it was warped about .011in. For PhotonVision, this doesn’t matter if mrcal is used. Mrcal can calculate the board warp and account for it. As for feature tolerances on the samples I got, they are accurate and measure true to size with a pair of calipers.
There have been a few questions about support with Limelight. It seems that the large target supports Limelight and the small target may not support it due to a change made in opencv in version 4.6. I will be adding a limelight 9x11 version shortly.
Ready to Ship: Order your target today!
