LabVIEW USB Camera Field Connection

[jdaming]

I was a CSA for the offseason CowTown Throwdown. Multiple teams were having issues with their camera when connected to the competition field. We lowered settings to barebones in terms of resolution and compression. We checked firewall and other barriers. We verified that all of their cameras worked in the pits, but not on the competition field. We switched them over to Static IP and all of them started working.

This makes absolutely no sense to me as to why it would be the fix, does anyone have any ideas as to why it is the case?

[emelton]

I believe the camera connection in the DS is timing out before the network connection is made. Using fixed IP addresses bypasses the connection delay.

[Mark_McLeod]

This should be better in 2018.
The USB camera connections have been made much more forgiving and will try to reconnect.
Attached is a screenshot sequence of the 2018 Beta recovering after manually disconnecting/reconnecting the Ethernet connection. The sequence of images are taken during the recovery process.

[jdaming]

I believe the camera connection in the DS is timing out before the network connection is made. Using fixed IP addresses bypasses the connection delay.

I could buy that. It seems strange that this problem would only show up during the offseason event then.

Great to see a lot of much need debugging elements there on the 2018 system. Can’t wait to see more teams be successful at using multiple cameras as the main barrier of entry seemed to be connection/bandwidth issues and not the desire.

[Greg_McKaskle]

Sorry I didn’t see this earlier - lots of work and family stuff going on.

The camera server and clients in 2017 had timeout and restart code, but there wasn’t much diagnostic info shown, and the values seemed to be too short for some fields/conditions.

As Mark showed, quite a bit more info is being shown to better identify where the issue is occurring, what IP it is connecting to, etc. I’m glad you found a workaround.

Greg McKaksle

[CEF]

I could buy that. It seems strange that this problem would only show up during the offseason event then.

I think if you go back to the March/April timeframe, you’ll see a number of threads complaining about camera issues. See, e.g., https://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=156356

I know that our team had issues all season. It all worked great until we connected to the field.

[jdaming]

This is one of the reasons as a CSA it would be REALLY nice if we could have a second FMS (even the lite version would work) system running so that we could test team’s connection to the field and field related issues without having to debug it on the actual field. So many times we say to teams “I hope your problem is fixed…we’ll see at your next match” and then we find out it isn’t and it is too late to do anything.

This system would obviously be far away from the actual field so as to not interfere and on a different channel.

What are the main reasons this can’t happen? I thought FIRST ships 2 FMS systems on the truck?

[ndp]

This is one of the reasons as a CSA it would be REALLY nice if we could have a second FMS (even the lite version would work) system running so that we could test team’s connection to the field and field related issues without having to debug it on the actual field. So many times we say to teams “I hope your problem is fixed…we’ll see at your next match” and then we find out it isn’t and it is too late to do anything.

This system would obviously be far away from the actual field so as to not interfere and on a different channel.

What are the main reasons this can’t happen? I thought FIRST ships 2 FMS systems on the truck?

To my knowledge, they ship one Case 33 and spares of various equipment items. Shipping two full field’s worth of equipment would be expensive and takes up a significant amount of space.