Looking to for recommendations on USB cameras to use for AprilTag processing.
In the past we’ve had great success with PS3 Eye Cameras, as they are very high fps and cheap…but are very large.
Obviously there are tons and tons of cameras on amazon, but its hard to tell what info on there is accurate, what camera has a good fps, which one isn’t too fish eye’ed. ETC.
Also, obviously this post has been made many times before, I’m just hoping to find more recent info.
I recommend the Arducam brand OV9281, or a generic AR0144 cam if you want to save a bit of money. Otherwise, most 60fpa webcams will work fine, though it’s hard to find one with a good mount.
We’ve used several of the Arducam OV9281. One came out-of-focus, but it has a threaded lens mount and it was easy to fix the focus. We also had one fail with no apparent contact or damage. Overall, we still like them and have no plans to change in 2024, unless the Next Great Thing ™ is significantly better.
The defacto easy USB camera is Microsoft life cam. It’s not great, it’s easy to find and doesn’t require special drivers. At one point it was a first choice item for like 20 credits.
That being said we have used other fisheye cameras from Amazon for driver POV, but that’s not at all helpful for AprilTags.
I’d also second the arducams or cameras for the rpi/Jetson nano.
If you are going to do image processing you might want a coprocessor anyways and typically you get much better direct control over those ribbon cable types vs generic USB.
Arducams makes a really cool optical zoom adjustable ribbon cable camera that would really make finding long distance tags easier without losing resolution.
Livonia Warriors actually had a really great demo at their pit of their own limelight-esque solution with Jetson nano and rpi with the ribbon style cameras
Lifecams are great,they work with literally anything. The only downside is low FPS.
I forgot to mention that the USB cable attachment on Arducam and other camera modules sucks. I strongly recommend using hot glue to reinforce the bond between the came and connector. The mount I linked before has a cable strain relief as well which is a HUGE help.
MS Lifecams are popular but I dislike using them, mostly for the fact that they’re rather annoying to work with from a hardware POV.
I tend to use built in cameras at this point (Apple’s stuff is so much better than a cheap Toshiba from 2008), but I know Logitech makes some pretty solid stuff.
Essentially by moving the grid around, skewing the grid, adjusting as it directed it can figure out the properties intrinsicly.
We need something like that for getting the properties of common FRCFIRST Robotics Competition cameras and a way to test/cal unknowns. Maybe those existing tools are fine but limited to Linux afaik
