Does anyone know if there has been a recent update to the FMS?
Our drivers have told me that our camera feed has stopped working on the field. It works perfectly in the pits and it has worked fine for the two other districts that we’ve attended.
I’m trying to rule out all possible causes.
In case anyone is wondering, we’re not band-width limited. We have the camera set to the lowest resolution setting, like 70% compression, and 10 FPS.
Okay, our driver (and our programming student Ben) got it figured out (I’m at work today, so I was a bit nervous about what was going on).
We made one change to the dashboard before this event: we passed some arm control information from the robot to the dashboard so we could view what was going on with the arm pot, the commanded PWM, and a few other things without needing to run through the play button. When they reverted back to the old dashboard from Grand Blanc, the camera feed worked on the field again.
Here is what is weird: the above changes have nothing to do with the camera feed so I don’t know why it would have any effect. We were only sending about 16 bytes of data every 50 ms, so it shouldn’t be limiting our bandwidth.
More important: why would the camera feed work perfectly fine in our pit but not on the field?
I have noticed that the “handshake” to get video to start displaying on the dashboard is not all that robust. I frequently need to close and re-open the Smart Dashboard before a match in order to get the camera feed started.
It looks like I spoke too soon. In our next practice match the camera feed was dead again.
We can’t close and re-open our LabVIEW dash without forcing it closed by logging out of Windows. I don’t know why it won’t close when we command it to close. The process of logging out then logging back in and restarting the driver station and dash takes about 3 - 5 minutes so that’s probably not a good option right before a match starts.
In 7 competitions last year and 2 this year, we have never had a problem with the camera feed starting. It really has me baffled.
If you go to the setup tab on the driver station and choose either C++ or Java for the dashboard it will close the LabVIEW dashboard and try to open the SmartDashboard in either the C++ or Java location, which would presumably fail. Then you can click the default dashboard button again and it will relaunch the LabVIEW dashboard.
We had intermittent camera in Las Vegas that we traced to a broken ethernet port on the camera.
Thanks, Joe. I’ll pass that on to the guys at the event.
Sure you can. Go to the Setup tab and select “Remote Dashboard” and it’ll shut down the local dashboard. Then select “Local Dashboard” and it’ll start it back up again.
Chris,
Have you considered just swapping the camera? I know… shouldn’t be the issue… however maybe worth trying for one match?
Update: the team found a short in the power cable. They fixed it and it’s working again.
I can’t wait until work is done today. Being away from the competition has been stressful.
But it worked fine in the pits with a faulty power cable…?
2729 has a similar issue at MAR Champs that I am trying to help debug. Camera works fine in the pits, but does not connect on the field. They are using SmartDashboard.
Hopefully they can hop on the field during the lunch break to diagnose.
It was intermittant. The jostling around on the field would cut power to the camera and then it would take 20 seconds or so for the camera to come back to life (providing power wasn’t cut again by more jostling).
Hello!
I dont know if our ds guy is going to post tonight “because sleep”, but we can see with a vlc stream… If I understand right we still cannot use our automated targeting system, but its progress!
What does the console output, if anything, while the camera is attempting to connect?
I don’t have that info unfortunately because I wasn’t able to set it up with console output during a match. The problem only occurs during actual matches – in the pits, there’s no problem, and when we connected to the field at lunch there was no problem. The problem seems to be SmartDashboard, as the stream itself seems to work, so at this point, we’re going with VLC to stream it with an overlay set on the camera. I wish I could get you more info, but we’d have to risk a match to get it.