PhotonVison on Limelight not connecting

Technical Programming
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I installed the latest release of PhotonVision (beta 8 I think) on my limelight 2+, and I’m unable to connect to the web interface. I’ve re-flashed it multiple times, tried connecting with and without robot power, with and without school wifi connection, ethernet and robot wifi. I’ve tried every different combination of connections I could think of, and it won’t connect. I have it connected through a network switch to the robot radio. When I’m connected to the robot, and run AngryIP, the camera does not appear, but there are 2 unnamed ips, which I tried connecting to directly on port 5800, but got nothing. I’m out of Ideas, and really want to use photonvision with limelight.

Edit: For those of you here in the future, I solved the problem with a couple things.

  1. Make sure it is connected to 12v20a breaker.
  2. Check network wiring: I have network cable from RoboRio to network switch, then from that network switch through an RPM to the leftmost port on the radio. The limelight is connected to another port on the original network switch.
  3. Make sure you are connecting to the right hostname. This wasn’t the cause of my original problem, but after I solved it, I changed the hostname and set a static ip address, I forgot about it, and tried to still connect to photonvision.local:5800, when I really needed to connect to 3767camera.local:5800.

Hope this helps someone with using PhotonVision their own Limelight, and thank you to everyone who helped me!

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Side note: the latest is now 2023.1.2

Couple things to check:

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We’ve had a similar issue, check if the limelight is getting enough power.

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I’ve updated to the newest version just before posting the topic and it still didn’t work

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What’s your networking setup? What’s plugged into what? What image are you flashing, and how are you flashing it?

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It’s connected to a 20a breaker on a main port of the PDH. It’s on our team’s robot from last year, and it worked last year running limelight

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Using Balena etcher to flash “photonvision-v2023.1.2-linuxarm64-image_limelight.xz”

Rio ethernet going through an RPM to the leftmost port on the radio, rightmost port running to a network switch, with a cord running to the limelight

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There’s your issue, maybe. The second radio port is flakey going on unusable. If you can dig up a network switch, can you try that?

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so just use one port on the radio? would POE carry over through the ethernet port?

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No the POE injector must still be directly connected to the radio

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So your saying run ethernet from rio to network switch, then inject poe between there and radio, and have limelight coming from the network switch?

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Yup! And make sure to use the good port of the 2 that are on the radio. Photon will be publishing a wiring diagram soontm showing all this

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Ok, I’ll try this, and get back to you with my results

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Can you reflash it back to the latest Limelight release and go through the Limelight setup of limelight.local:5801 and connect?

If so then you can pretty much rule out power, laptop and Ethernet cable.

When you flash it with Photonvision and you are trying to connect to Photonvision through the same setup at photonvision .local:5800 is there activity on the connector lights?

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I rewired the network cables, and was actually able to connect! Unfortunately, when I actually tried using it, I calibrated the camera on 320x240, and tracking AprilTags was extremely slow, at about 10 fps and almost 2 seconds of latency. The performance numbers in the top left of the dashboard said the latency was about 70ms, but in reality it was more like 2000ms, which made it practically unusable. Is this normal for limelight?

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A couple troubleshooting steps:

  1. in the settings tab, confirm the cpu is not being performance limited by low voltage or high temps
  2. restart the unit and refresh the webpage a few times. See if that causes the symptom to go away
  3. look at the results in outline viewer. See if the lag is stream-only, or if it’s both the stream and the actual data going to the RIO
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Note that the stream latency will be a lot higher than data latency. 70ms/200ms seems about right for an older Limelight with the Pi 3 Compute. I see up to a second of lag at higher resolutions, but the data updates instantly if I watch the bottom right of my screen (well, 30ms latency on nice processors).

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I don’t know what the outline viewer is, but when I turned it on today, there was very little latency. I did switch between a few tabs really quickly, and noticed that the stream lagged after that. I just refreshed the web interface and it worked great! Thanks for the help everyone!

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Similar issues. Device is pingable and shows up in discovery tools, but web interface will not connect on photovision.local:5800 or ip:5800. Flashed a pi and tried it on the same network and it worked fine. Now that 2023 Limelight firmware updates are available this is a little less interesting but still an itch to be scratched. I’m wondering if a recent photonvision update is causing problems on limelight hardware. Will try an older release.

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Interesting. Ususally, no matter what settings you have, you’ll be able to connect to photonvision.local as a troubleshooting step when your IP or hostname doesn’t work. An easier (imo) method that I prefer to use is connecting via IP adress, that way even if your url isn’t working there’s a backup. The last time I used it was in districts last season so I am admittedly out of touch with the current state of photonvision, so the IP thing might not be possible anymore.