[Important] For LabView teams running USB cameras

Technical Programming
#1

Note: this only affects users who programmed their robot in LabView

There was a bug identified in the FRC update that will cause your cameras to work improperly on the field. This bug will be resolved in the upcoming team update after this weeks events. We’re sorry for the inconvenience that this may cause while we work to resolve the issue.

If any teams are in dire need of their cameras to function properly for their playoff matches, send me an email and I can get you updated with the beta .vi’s that we are distributing for testing at the Kettering 1 event. (Edit: I won’t have the second patch until tomorrow morning)

For the time being, other events are being rather silent about this issue that appears to be affecting every client. If anyone has some insights on events that aren’t miket1 it would be appreciated. From what we see here it’s a race condition 50/50 if a labview camera connects to the field.

~Jake

#2

Yep, for now CSA’s are distributing out the hotfix posted by Kevin O’Connor on Schoology.

Roughly about 10-15 teams at Lake Superior/Northern Lights regionals experienced it but we have gotten most of them resolved (so USB camera works fine now without having to re-boot Robo-Rio), but 2 which we will try and figure out tomorrow morning. (we suspect these teams aren’t re-building their LabView code properly after we updated their vi files) The hot-fixes seem mostly successful though. Hope this insight helps.

#3

Second PSA- the fix deployed earlier today is actually bad. What it did was invert the race condition, meaning the times it worked were just false positives. More information should be released tomorrow morning.

#4

Out of curiosity, which update is this referring to? I’m mostly looking for a date.

#5

2017.2.0 will be rolled out in the next team update.

The broken fix we were referring to was distributed individually to the Field technical staff and wasn’t made public (in case it was… you know… broken)

#6

Sorry, I mean the previous one that caused this.

#7

Don’t know exactly what caused this because it was never able to be reproduced in a controlled facility, even a few hours ago. The .vis were rewritten for camera connections for the 2017 season and this is the code that is causing the issue (specifically the code that helps the dashboard resolve the address of the mjpeg stream). It’s entirely a field side issue which is why it hasn’t been observed earlier. Subjects are able to view their camera totally fine on the pits and practice field.

#8

Oh boy, I didn’t know the 1st PSA was bad… thanks for the update. Is the second PSA link on schoology, or do you currently contain it? If so, I’ll email you asap.

Most likely the we’ll keep the teams that are working at the moment with PSA 1 (keep an eye on them because they are consistently working) and try giving PSA 2 to teams that PSA 1 isn’t resolving the issues for. (possibly the 2 exceptions I ran into today) Also has the second PSA been a 100% success rate at your event, or do you not know?

#9

The second update hasn’t been tested yet because the teams I was working with were totally exhausted. We have the earliest start time of any event (8:30 am est) so I’ll try my best to confirm that the second fix is working so we can get it distributed as soon as possible.

E/ technically this is the third update because we rolled out the second update a few hours ago and it failed

2E/ to the teams that are working totally fine, from what I can see your “working” status will flip a coin when you restart, so take of that what you will

#10

If you post your results on this thread after tomorrow morning, that would be much appreciated! Thanks a lot for clarifying.

#11

I ask because we ran into problems at week 0 with our USB camera not displaying or only displaying a static image, though I believe it might be semi-repeatable back at the shop.

#12

This makes me glad my event is a week 3, hopefully all the kinks on FIRST’s end will be mostly worked out by then…

#13

Maybe. I’m never going to tell anyone that this is 100% of the issue, there are a lot of custom built aspects to the camera server that are relatively fragile. I’m not going to say that this will help all camera issues but it will definitely check the “something I didn’t do” box off

This is definitely among the least of the fields problems. I hope that frc can put a wrangle on these field setup times so my events don’t get 6 hours delay or I’ll have to put my FTAs on suicide watch.

#14

It sure would be nice if there was an announcement from FIRST HQ on this matter. Lots of teams have lots invested here. Thanks for your efforts and good luck solving the issue.

#15

Has this been addressed? I have not seen a team update on this so checking as it has been a week.

We played week 0 at Southfield, and had issues with USB camera stream from bot. We were given 3 updated VIs on a thumbdrive, but seeing stuff was starting to work, )Autons and climbing), we thought better not to make an untested change.

Now we are testing for week 3 at Waterford, and wondering if we should be updating those files or not.

#16

I ran into this problem trying to add a simple viewing camera for the dashboard right before stop build day. We ultimately decided to just stick with an axis camera in addition to the one we use for vision processing. I’m glad to see this problem being resolved.

#17

Found it.

http://www.ni.com/download/first-robotics-software-2015/5112/en/

#18

FIRST/NI has released a driver station update that (to my knowledge) will be mandatory for Week 3 events. It includes the updated WPI Lib image drivers that actually work on the field. If you were at a Week 1 event and got the updated VIs and are now going to a Week 2 event, your cameras will work without the driver station update. You might as well do it though, because you’ll need it starting Week 3. Your always helpful CSAs should have a thumb drive with the update and should be available to help you update at competition if you can’t do it at home.

#19

We’re competing right now at Idaho and cannot stream camera, I know at least 2 other teams are struggling with this. We’re in LabVIEW and have updated our driver station (yesterday) - we see camera in the pit but not on the field. Can someone give me an update on what you would recommend? :slight_smile: Rookie team and new to programming, we just want to stream and our first match is 15 minutes after opening ceremonies, so simple, fast fixes and suggestions would be much appreciated! Thanks!

#20

After you run the update suite, you should restart the computer, rebuild and redeploy code to the robot, and rebuild the dashboard. When you connect to the robot, the diagnostics tab of the DS should say library version 17.2.0 (DS version # does not change). Did you do all of this? Does it display the right lib version?

If yes, after the robot starts up go to the diagnostics tab on the DS and click restart robot code. Sometimes that makes stubborn USB cameras start working.

If none of this works, find one of the CSAs at your event (wearing a volunteer shirt and a bright orange hat) and they should be able to help you. If you can’t find one in person, the pit admin table can call one to your pit for you.