If you’ve already been to a regional, how much of a visual impairment were the defenses to the driver? Did it slow down your driving? Was going over defense made significantly harder. Was capturing (driving up onto the tower) difficult, how easy was it to see the polycarb barriers?
Well its hard … even with a camera there is lag, in fact we sheered 6 bolts on our hex shaft holding our shooter by running into the far castle barrier that is very hard to see. Over time our driver got used to the lag and only used it for low goals.
Actual field visibility is fairly good but the glass gets smeared . I would say parking on batter got easy and as time went on LG and Scaling were easier too. We are working on HG still and will change out our camera for CVR to a lower lag model and adding another camera for HG shots changing things around.
Okay, thanks for letting me know. What do you think of this idea. ( we are planning on testing this out at our first regional at bayou). Geting a collapsable 8 foot pole, and than mounting that to our driver station with a camera on the top. It’s legal, and should theoretically have no lag since direct usb 3.0 connection. Would you think a birds eye view like this would help?
Possibly… I just think it may be a pain to lug around . Other than that more view the better! More importantly bring every spare part you have. This game is brutal on your bot. Harden every connection too. Can’t win if your bot is broken.
As a drive team coach I thought that visibility would be very bad. I was surprised that it is not that bad having something like a spring loaded small flag just to see over the sally port is a good idea we have some battle axes that go up and down bright yellow for visibility. We also gave the axes different colored stripes.
We added hot pink duct tape to our scaling hook to help the driver see it. Seemed to help.
Cool idea 
I wrote some observation from me driving this last week.
Swiffer poles work great (especially if you have to fly, they break into sections that fit in a suitcase), they’re light, stiff, and you can make them any length you need. We’re experimenting with this idea. Considering a separate tablet for just the camera view, to save space on our main DS computer display.
We use a lenovo Ultra book as our driver station, were just planning on using a second one for the display.