If I have a camera with an LED ring mounted on one side of my robot and a limelight on the other, can I feed the normal camera’s stream into the limelight and switch between the two?
I have gone through the user manual for the Limelight v2 and it doesn’t mention secondary cameras, so it seems like this feature is not supported. Does anyone know if there is a hack around this or would I have to run a separate vision system on my other camera?
If it’s the case that this feature isn’t available currently, I would like to suggest to the limelight team to add this feature in future versions of limelight. The biggest reason to buy a limelight, in my opinion, is for the pre-configured software, and having the ability to use multiple cameras would be a huge plus!
No, I don’t think so. However, you could get the stream and process it on the Rio (using OpenCV). Probably not a good idea due to the heavy computing it needs to do, but it might be worth a try.
Has anyone successfully implemented this, and if so is there some sort of catch?
Here’s what I’m trying to do:
Our drivers want a Webcam in both the back and the front of the robot. There is a limelight on the front of the robot. Early in the season, I had played around with getting the Webcam plugging directly into the limelight working but when I didn’t get it in around half an hour I moved on since plugging it into the roborio was pretty much just as good. Now, since the roborio won’t allow two webcams without a ton of extra work, I want one in the Rio and one in the limelight. When I put those lines in the code to cause it to use the Webcam like from the documentation, not only does it not work, it also stops getting any input from the limelight (the stream goes away but so does my read of values off the limelight). This is the case even when the other Webcam is completely unplugged from the entire system. Thoughts?
Why do you think it’s a ton of extra work? You don’t say what language you are using, but in LabView it happens automatically, in C++/Java it’s one more line of code (a second startAutomaticCapture). Switching camera feeds is only a few more lines of code in C++/Java; not sure about LabView.
Please share the code you are adding; in general adding a camera on the Rio shouldn’t have an effect on the Limelight stream.
But if you want to run two cameras at the same time, and off of a hub (since one of our USB ports is being used for the NavX) there are problems with power draw (because of the hub) and fps (at least that’s what some other chief delphi threads conclude) You can speed up the fps if you decrease the resolution, but that’s a compromise I’d rather not make since the webcams are already pretty bad.
It’s not as easy as another automatic capture.
This is an interesting resource:
The idea was if I ran one off of the limelight it would solve all of that.
I use Java. Code (In teleopPeriodic):
NetworkTableInstance.getDefault().getTable(“limelight”).getEntry(“stream”).setNumber(2);
If you aren’t running version 6 of their 2019 image for the limelight, make sure you upgrade.
Also, if you are running the LL, the auxillary camera into the limelight, and a third camera in the roborio, you MUST turn down the stream mode on the LL to low. Otherwise you will saturate the bandwidth of your robot and potentially starve control of your robot.
It happened to us in our last event, cost us enough RP to keep us from the district championship.