Is it absolutely necessary in this FRC game to have a camera to have a good visibility. We aren’t able to mount it to get good visibility. Also how to toggle between two cameras
It helps…not necessary though. We used our mainly for LG lineup in SD because of lag. Check the visibility thread for pictures from the Driver Station I posted. Really unless you get a higher frame-rate camera is pretty useless for driving. We are trying a new one in CVR.
If you do add one protect it.
Our at-home practice showed that it was quite useful, so 2363 added one to our competition bot, running at 10fps. We expected to use it when the robot was out of view to pick up balls, score low goals and to open the bridge and port. Our driver reported that it was only actually useful when opening the bridge and port. Taking eyes off the robot to look at the camera feed, unless absolutely necessary, slowed him down.
We went into the competition expecting to open the doors for others to pass through. After trying it, we abandoned this tactic as too inefficient, timewise. This tactic requires very skilled driving by all three robots, and you rarely get that combo in the quals. In the eliminations, you are using any extra time for scoring balls to capture the tower.
So, in our experience, the answer to your question is no. You would be better served by adding some flags to your bot to allow the driver to keep track of your bot without taking eyes off the field. On the other hand, adding a camera is easy, so there’s not much downside to doing so.
Our team is switching between two webcams. Check out this thread here: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=142814
We are using Labview, so if you need any more help, feel free to PM me or reply to this or that thread
Could you link the visibility thread?