Hi Everyone,
My team did not use vision last year but we are hoping to implement some vision code for the coming year. After a lot of research, we have decided to use a raspberry pi and an IP camera. However, we are not sure what IP camera to purchase. Any recommendations?
Thanks!
Greta
The standard for ip cameras in frc would be the axis network camera. I believe the m1013 is the current model in terms of frc use. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.
That’s a curious combination, why an IP camera?
We are sure we want to use a pi. However, we weren’t sure which type of camera to use. We considered a USB camera and a pi camera. We decided against the USB camera because from what I can tell you had to work around some errors to access the stream. We decided against the pi camera because then we have no fall back if we cannot get the pi working. We liked the IP camera because, if we are unable to successfully use the pi, we would be able to fall back to using the IP camera with GRIP on the computer.
I am not sure how sound this reasoning is though. Is there another combination you think would be better? We are certainly open to suggestions!
Your reasoning seems sound, in particular the rationale for having a backup in case you can’t get the PI working.
I’ve personally had bad experiences a few years ago with IP cameras adding additional latency, but it’s possible that is no longer an issue now.
Axis cameras are pretty standard. For vision processing, i’d recommend the M1011 over the M1013 - the 1013 has some auto-image-adjust features which you cannot turn off and can wreak havoc with image processing algorithms.
Network cameras have a nice user interface and require fairly minimal setup to get a lot of flexibility. However, you may see some network latency compared to a really really nice USB camera. So far I prefer network cameras over usb due to this, but that’s more of a personal-preference thing.