FRC1629 is using a Limelight V2 to track the vision target. It’s been hugely successful at the shop, and in the pits, but as soon as the robot is taken to the field, it’s a “PAIN” to keep it connected.
The stream to the Driver station is not required for us, all we need is for the Rio to see the network table variables.
Since we had seen network issues early on at our shop, we implemented a “go/no-go” indication on the limelight using the LEDs. When the robot is disabled, the code switches the Limelight LEDS between OFF and FLASHING once a second. So if the LEDS are doing their blink/off dance, we know the Rio can talk to the camera.
We could run tethered in the pits and the camera worked fine, but on the field, as soon as the robot connected to the FMS, the LEDs would stop their dance. We tried power cycling the Limelight in this state, and it re-booted but just sat there, not talking to the rio.
We have configured the limelight with Static IP 10.16.29.11, and talk to it at this IP when doing setup.
Our Driver station is using DHCP to get an IP
When the limelight won’t talk on the field, it also will not respond to a ping at 10.16.29.11
We tried several things to get it to work, at the suggestion of the FTAs (who were extremely helpful, but did not have any history with the limelight).
We ensured that all DS firewall was completely disabled (it still had a few modes turned on).
We loaded Bonjour on the DS as the suggestion from Triple Helix (who were also having different limelight problems but who were great helping us out)
Eventually the final thing that we did that seemed to get us up and running was to ensure that out DS laptop was rebooted after doing work in the pit in tethered mode. Whenever we restarted our laptop on entry to the field, the camera would talk to the Rio.
An interesting factoid was that once, when we were successfully connected to the camera, the FTA did a field reset, and the limelight immediately stopped communicating. AND… since the drivers were behind the sandstorm screens, they weren’t aware of the problem.
This workaround seems fragile at best.
Once we had finally establed a sequence to get the limelight working on the field, it seemed that our laptop took longer to connect to the FMS for plain driving. It took so long that the FTA then gave us a USB-Ethernet adapter to speed things up. This is a brand new I5 notebook so there should not have been a problem with the network.
Anyone know what the best configuration is for running the limelight successfully in the shop, pit and field?
Should we go static IP on the Laptop as well ?
Note: I was hoping to switch up to using two limelights, but after the problem, and Triple Helix’s problems I’m dubious as to whether it’s a good idea.