Router/Camera/SmartDashboard issues.

Technical Java
1

Hi, I have seen a couple of other posts about this but none that were really resolved, and I was wondering if anyone had any answers. My team loves the smartdashboard, but this year we are encountering a bizarre error with it. Our camera will be plugged into our router and through a wired connection to the team computer, we can get the camera extension image perfectly from smart dashboard (Note that we are not using our own WPICameraExtension but actually the standard one that comes with smartdashboard). Unfortunately, when we try wireless, the connection is extremely spotty, and for the most part, the camera extension will say “no connection” on the smart dashboard.

 However, and this is the weirdest part, through wireless, the computer is able to ping the robot as well as the camera, and we can see the camera in NI/FRC Dashboard as well as on the browser.  Also, the driver station as well as smartdashboard have communications with the robot, and it can be enabled and disabled. We have verified that our camera ip is set correctly in smartdashboard, and our team number is correct. The only solution we have found is lowering the resolution in the axis camera settings to something less than 640x480 and the smartdashboard will pick the camera up wirelessly every time. It appears to be some sort of issue with sending too much information through the dashboard, but i'm not really sure.  If anyone has had similar issues, or knows of a solution that doesn't mean losing information on the image, please let us know!
                                                          Thanks! :)
                                                                Carter,
                                                                         Team 3929
2

We will be limited to 7Mb/s bandwidth this year, unlike last year which had no limit.
There is also Quality of Service implemented that guarantees command packets (& pings) will get through, but excess video packets will get dumped.

R59

Communication between the ROBOT and the OPERATOR CONSOLE is restricted as follows:

…

B. Bandwidth: 7 Mbits/second

That means you cannot run your camera at full resolution/no compression/30fps. (~15Mb/s)

The default Dashboard is setup with monitor tools that let you play dynamically with the camera image to perfect the resolution/fps/compression that fits your need.

The reason you are running into this problem wirelessly is that the FRC Bridge Configuration tool setup the DAP-1522 to have the same limits as the playing field will have. That way you can see this problem now rather than being surprised by the limit when you get to the competiton.

3

Ahhh thank you so much!!!