We are a rookie team and since a camera was not supplied with this years Kit Of Parts, are trying to find a low cost alternate to the Axis 1011 camera. Does FRC allow any other camera or does someone know of a low budget camera that will work for this? Funds are tight for our rookie team but we realize a camera would help in driving as well as shooting this year. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
The FRC code libraries are only compatible with Axis model cameras.
If another camera is chosen, then you’ll have to write your own libraries to handle the protocol to the camera.
Doable if you have the right skills, but there won’t be many people who can help you if you run into obstacles.
If you search around you may find resources or libraries for other cameras but outside the Axis you are generally on your own. We discovered this when contemplating an IR camera, as most security cameras are IP cameras now.
Many teams have gone with different USB cameras that are interfaced through an outboard processor. 971 is a perfect example.
Axis 207s are a good substiture and aren’t too hard to find used on eBay.
for seeing most any camera works but if you want image processing it is extremely difficult. Last year I spent the entire build season and right up to regionals working on image processing with a non axis camera, so if you want to do image processing splurge and buy the axis camera.
If you are just looking for something that will be used for the driver dashboard, you can setup RoboRealm in the middle. The app has many more cameras that it can interface with (IP cameras included) which means you can let us worry about the connectivity. The way this works is you run RR on the driver station, it connects to the remote IP camera, your dashboard then connects to RR’s internal webserver which looks like an Axis camera (yes, we set it up that way). This way you can purchase just about any IP camera and have the dashboard use it …
Just a thought …
STeven.
Will a USB camera work for this application (Roborealm) or does it specifically have to be an IP camera?
Specifically, can I connect multiple USB cameras to my netbook running RR and have the video feeds show up at the DS?
The extra expense/complexity of the USB camera is paying for and mounting a USB host on the robot. Whereas the IP cameras just plug into the robot bridge.
There’s nothing that says the camera must use a particular communication scheme (IP, USB, serial). RoboRealm seems to handle USB cameras as well as IP cameras.
In theory you could plug multiple cameras into a PC on the bot and have RR send them to the DS … but you’d very quickly exceed the allowed bandwidth. You could just have one feed at a time if that works for you and use the NetworkTables to send a variable back to RR to select which feed to view. Not sure if that’s really feasible to do by the controller (i.e. press a button to switch views) during the high pressure 2 minute competition but there isn’t anything that would prevent you from doing so.
We can post something to this effect on the RR side if you are interested.
STeven.