Anyone know what the exact color is for those targets as my team would like to order more fabric.
Welcome to Chief Delphi!
FIRST provides teams with a large amount of documentation to read through, and is usually best to refer there first before asking questions here. This will likely get you your answer faster (although I do admit it is a bit more work).
The answer you are looking for can be found in the “Where to Get More?” document here.
The fabric is specified as
hot pink, #1201
forurescent green, 1089
From Seattle Fabrics www.seattlefabrics.com
FYI, another website for 1000 Denier Cordura Plus bumper material is http://www.ahh.biz. But this site does not have the vision target colors.
Just as an update on the Vision Target colors, as of today:
Seattlefabrics.com is out of stock in their hot pink cordura and they won’t have it in stock again until next week sometime.
Ahh.biz doesn’t carry hot pink or fluorescent green at all.
I called several other fabric businesses listed online for Diener Cordura in #1201 Hot Pink and #1089 Fluorescent Green, but nobody carried anything close to those colors, except this store:
I ordered their neon green and neon pink 1000 diener cordura to be overnighted to me. Their material bolts do not show color numbers, so we are going by what I see on my computer screen and by their color description only. They told me, in real life the colors are much brighter than what is shown on my screen, so hopefully, we will have a match. I will report back tomorrow night whether I had success with these colors.
Thanks for the work guys - keep us updated. I’d been looking for a source too without any luck.
Truthfully though, getting colors that match FIRST’s exactly isn’t terribly important.
It’s nearly 100% certain that the lighting where-ever you are working is going to be significantly different than the lighting on the FIRST competition field.
Even a relatively insignificant change in brightness can cause you issues in tracking. If you aren’t planning on recalibrating your color values once you get to the actual venue and get out on the field, you should. Otherwise, you’re likely to have issues.
I suppose, technically, it can, but it’s not likely to be a problem. For its main test, the provided vision tracking code uses the image’s hue, which does not vary much with the brightness of the lighting.
It might be worth mentioning that we built our vision target out of posterboard that we found at wall-mart. They have a green color and a pink color that are very close to the actual colors of the sample material provided in the kit. It costs less than $2 to get more than enough posterboard to make a competition sized target.
We’ve found that in a very bright room (half our room is floor-to-ceiling windows to the outside) that a change of brightness of 20 units along with a resampling of the HSL values resulted in us going from nearly untrackable (ghosts were flickering in and out of the green color) to very very trackable. Your mileage may vary, of course.
We have trouble with different lighting, the programmers request we close the bay door when testing code because they have calibrated the program to work with flourescent light, and natural light causes problems.
I just received the overnighted denier cordura material from rockywoods.com. It definitely looks like the correct colors. I won’t have access to the KOP material until later this afternoon to double check, but I will report as soon as I can make the comparison.
By the way, rockywoods.com updated their denier cordura web page with more representative color swatches of their fluorescent green and hot pink colors. The colors on their web page look like the material I have in my hands. I think this material and these colors will work fine, but I will let the group know later today.
To comment on the lighting changes. Sunlight is one of the types of light that will shift the reflected green colors more than almost anything else. Also, while light bulbs are produced to certain standards, sunlight has no such standards and can vary widely depending on mother nature’s mood.
The effect of the sunlight that causes problems isn’t the brightness of the sun, but the color. Commonly being yellow, it will shift the green up and the pink down.
As Alan mentioned, we attempted to make the HSL threshold wide enough to work in most environments, but understanding it and learning to predict and control the camera is of course a really good thing. To assist with this, a new white paper is up.
http://phoenix.ni.com/support/softlib/first/frc/FileAttachments/FRCCameraWhitepaper.docx
I fully agree! No matter what, it’s been my experience that you’ll have to recalibrate your colors to match the competition lighting anyways, so why spend the time or money?
For teams who want to purchase the exact material, seattlefabrics.com is out of stock in the hot pink, but I found the exact cordura material and colors here:
Attached is a photo I took this morning of our practice vision targets. The target on the left consists of the cordura material from the KOP and the two targets on the right consist of the cordura material purchased from rockywoods.com. We purchased a 1/2 yard of each color and that material covered three new targets for our practice field.