Camera and Debugging

I just got home from another 3 hours with the new hardware. Things are going pretty smoothly so far, however we hit a few snags again tonight. Our goal was to get the camera working. Each team is given a Kit Of Parts (KOP) and this year we got an Axis web cam! It's kinda like Christmas when you open up the boxes and crates. Tonight, our goal was to get the camera working with the cRIO (main controller).

After spending quite some time trying to "log in" to the camera we finally discovered that we were using the wrong username and password. Yes, you heard me correct, we log into the camera as a device on our robot network. Pretty cool stuff! Remember, our network hums along at 802.11n.

Once we were able to reset the camera to factory settings, we were able to log into the camera and configure it to work on our robot's network. At that point the camera worked fine; we were able to see the output on the computer screen and it wasn't half bad. Next we tackled getting our software to read the camera.

We compiled many different sample programs that claimed to track a certain color of light. We downloaded the .out files, but didn't seem to get the results we were looking for. We were not quite sure how the program was running so as a last-ditch effort we tried getting the Wind River debugger to run with the cRIO. Well, let's just say we have a lot more reading to do before tomorrow. The debugger appeared to be starting up, but didn't really do what we expected. We got some error messages that I really can't remember right now. At this point it was almost time for us to be out of the building, so we were in "hurry-up" mode.

Given a little time to read about the camera and debugger, tomorrow, with a little luck, we should be able to get some valid data from the camera. Check back tomorrow and see how we did.