Buy Limelight?

Technical Programming
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My team is thinking of getting the Limelight camera to take our robots sensors to the next level.
We have programmed encoders and used PIDs and wish to use vision to strengthen our autonomous and teleop even more.
We’d like to know what kind of capabilities and experience other teams have with the lime light and if getting a regular webcam would still be as sufficient.
We’d also like to know the difficulty of programming it. We have done a little bit of encoders & PIDs and would like to know if it’s a big learning curve from that level.
All responses are greatly appreciated ! Thank you !

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The Limelight is quite easy to program. If your team doesn’t have the knowledge/resource to do custom vision processing then it is worth a try. It was really useful for lining up the robot to this year’s vision targets, for example. If you have done PIDs you would know what error is, and the Limelight can automatically calculate your error to the vision target and let you do a simple PID loop to correct the error. There is a list of all the things it measures for you here: http://docs.limelightvision.io/en/latest/networktables_api.html The same website has all the other documentation for it as well.

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It is a simpler vision system. If your team has a reasonable good programming team and you guys want to expand capabilities, then it can be a great tool. Using it is not too hard, but you need to figure out how you want to approach a target and track it. Also it depends on how next years game is. If there are a lot of targets then it is great. If it is Power Up, then it is close to useless.

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The above post do the reasoning well so I want to say before helping.

Buy Limelight? - yes

It will bring vision easily to your robot and you will succeed quickly. Then after that if a student is inspired enough get a raspberry Pi (or other platform) and do it yourself.

What do many people say? Fail fast and fail cheep?

I understand Lime Light is not cheep but you will not fail either, but you still get FAST though.

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ftfy

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It just dawned on me this is

               Good
              /    \
            /        \
          /            \
     Cheap  ___________  Fast
             Pick Two
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