Rookie question, but we want to use two vision cameras for this year’s competition (PlayStation eye for driving and Microsoft lifecam for tracking) and looking into it, we believe we need a raspberry pi as a coprocessor. However, we have an unclear idea of wiring it. Do we connect the microusb power to the vrm and the USB of the pi to the USB of the roborio?
so you can do it either way. it is up to you, IF you can I would segust figuring out the current draw of your pi and also look up the specs for your pi (yes they do differ pi to pi) and then look at the specs of where you are powering it from and what it is and see which one will work best. For the camera connections you will just want to plug them into the USB of the pi and then you can either plug your pi straight into your radio with your rio or (this is what our team is doing but we have done both and our programmers prefer this method) put an Ethernet switch on the robot and have your rio and pi run into it and then put one cable into the radio
What we are trying to do is power the raspberry through a battery pack, which is legal, and connect it to the rio through ethernet using splitter to make sure that we can connect both the pi and mesh.
Alternatively, if you have no use of the rio usb ports besides cameras, just plug them in straight to the port rather than doing the raspberry pi.
Can you just hook the raspberry pi to the other Ethernet port on the radio? Or is the splitter needed?
You can directly connect it to the radio’s furthest Ethernet input. (Not the one next to the power port.) Make sure you don’t use the one next to the power port if you are using POE because the other Ethernet port does not support Power Over Ethernet. (I might be wrong about the POE thing but it is worth being aware of the risk )
the splitter is not 100% necessary our programmers just found it easier to use than the radio. It is also needed if you want to use more than one PI
Some teams have reported connectivity issues between the two radio ports. Eg they can connect from the PC to the Rio and Pi, but the Pi sometimes can’t connect to the Rio, which causes issues with NetworkTables. An easy fix for this is to use an Ethernet switch and connect the Rio, Pi, and radio to it.
This is why we are using a switch our team has had issues in the past not using one. It is possible but we had issues with it in the past occasonally
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