I have decided to make my award-winning FALCON Object Recognition System open-source in the spirit of gracious professionalism, and also in the hopes that it will find use among FIRST teams and grow even better than it already is. I have relased it under the terms of the GPL.
I would appreciate feedback regarding the website design, Wiki structure, and user manual user-friendliness .
If you use the system and like it, please consider donating an old Victor 883 to me so that I can continue working on robotics-related stuff.
By doing this you let the project help more teams than that small segment that can afford a $250 camera system. Although it may not seem like much compared to a $6,000 kit cost, to some teams its a large price.
Did you follow the link in the Wiki? If you click on that link, and then click “Add to Cart”, you will get the screen that I attached. Select the option that I highlighted in red, and you should be set!
Sure thing; I am adding a forum right now and will convert all my BMPs to JPEGs during the site upgrades. (I forgot to do that :o )
WOW! The world is very flat…
(I am reading The World is Flat and I just finished the part about the #4 flattner of the world.)
Back on topic, I love this program. I read through the manual and you did a fine job with this and I think many teams will use this and improve upon this before next year to make it perfect…
I’d love to see what Dave Lavery and the GDC could do with autonomous mode if they had one of these at their disposal! Could we have a 30-second autonomous mode with multiple tasks? (Wishful thinking, I know…)
The forums are now up and I have tried to reduce the page load time; please let me know if it still takes too long to load.
I’ll try to put a cleaned-up copy of the sample drivers out within a couple of weeks.
Aah…I didn’t see that yesterday…are you playing tricks with my mind?
Thanks again for this amazing contribution. I’m sending the info to my mentor so maybe (I doubt it, but just maybe) I’ll have this ready for Atlanta. (coughyeah, rightcough )
Now, on a 1024x768 desktop, I have to scroll horizontally on the RequiredHardware wiki page–the screenshot needs to be scaled down a bit.
Once I get the hardware, I’ll definitely help with the content on this site at the very least; I can add screenshots, etc…
Great stuff!
JBot
EDIT: Are you planning on making the wiki open? I might contribute later on if it is.
EDIT again: does the board come with a ribbon cable, or do I need to scrounge something up?
EDIT yet again: and does the JTAG cable come with the board or do I need to order that separately?
One can only hope…this was one of the reasons I released this system shortly after we were kicked from the running for Nats. I was hoping there might be another team crazy enough to try it for Nats…
Should be fixed now.
Thank you!
Yes, it is open. Email or PM me for the edit password (mainly used to keep spammers off of the Wiki)
I put some assembly instructions here:
There was a link in the Wiki under the “Required Hardware” section. You will need to scrounge up the parts to make it with, though.
A JTAG cable comes with the development board.
If you have any more questions, don’t hesitate to ask. If you want the IFI drivers in their current, “disheveled” state, just let me know. In fact, if you wouldn’t mind cleaning them up…
Just out of curiosity, did you have any gain problems with the camera sensor (that seems to be the problem with our CMUcam more than anything)? And how well did it track for you? Was it distracted, as the CMUcam was so often, by vapor lights in the shop? Did you pull any Innovation in Control awards at competition?
I have some other things that I need to do during code windows this week, but after West Michigan (and maybe during, even) I will start playing with this (unless something else code-wise breaks).
One other thing: did you find a good way of mounting this? And did you use the FIRST pan-tilt mechanism with it?
Very well; it never lost a lock, either on the practice field or on the competition field.
Nope. It even ignored the big projector at the regionals!
Yup, one at St. Louis. At Midwest, the arm change fouled up the autonomous code too badly for it to work.
We zip-tied the cameras to a long piece of angle iron with holes drilled for the lenses to stick out. When this was mouted at the top of the robot, it looked like a praying mantis. This prompted the name “Buggy” for the cameras.
We used the express Saturday delivery option, as I found out the development board I was going to use had a fried pin on it. Needless to say, the replacement came the next day! (It also came with a HEFTY shipping charge, somewhere around $50 :eek: )
Try UPS Ground, it should get to you in a few days.
The sunglasses were actually doubled up (two lenses on each camera) because the green lights were so insanely bright. Basically, you want them to appear medium green, not white.
I don’t know of a non-JavaScript way of doing that, except I think I read something about DIV tags and CSS being able to do that (it seems like you should be able to set the :hover background image and have it work that way). This approach might not work in Internet Explorer, or at all for that matter.
My mentor approved this system this past weekend. He just needed the info to order it. He ordered the board; now we’re just waiting on shipping. It might be in today; I don’t know yet (take a peek at this post time. 3:48AM local…).
What exactly do I need to download from Xilinx? I found the WebPack, but it is over a gig and my connection isn’t that fast…I can get it if I need it, but I have a hard time believing that I need to download a gig of tools to make this work.
Eagerly looking forward to playing with this system,
JBot
EDIT: I figured it out, and I updated the wiki article.
EDIT2: Your teaser pic link is broken. IMHO you should tear it down, but that’s up to you.
The other thing I’m seeing that is concerning me is the I/O board in the picture–the board in between the female headers on the Spartan and the camera sensor. Where did it come from?
That little adapter is my “cable”. I had no need for the length of cable for my desktop prototyping board, so I wired up that adapter instead. I don’t have a schematic for it, but it shoudn’t be too hard to figure it out from the cable construction diagram.
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Could we have a 30-second autonomous mode with multiple tasks? (Wishful thinking, I know…)
