Connecting the camera

[Robot Man]

I have not been able to connect to the camera.

As I read section 5.5.1 of the 2009 FRC Control System Manual I have assumed that I have to set a computer IP address and then talk to the camera to change its password.

A quick aside:  Re-reading it I wonder if there is another way of communicating with the camera?

Is the short ethernet cable that came with the system a "crossover" cable?

No matter what cable I use I can not communicate with the camera.

When I have the Driver Station plugged into my laptop using a standard ethernet cable my Windows Vista will show that a second network connnection is active.

One is my wireless connection and the other is called an "Unidentified Network".  I was able to change the IP address associated with the Unidentified Network device.

However, neither of the cables that I have will cause my laptop to recognize that something is there.

I have tried the short cable and my regular cable with the camera attached to the robot and my running the Dashboard program.  NOTHING but error messages there.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

[Philbot]

I actually found thet the camera works fine right out of the box.

However, the cable you use depends on your computer's ethernet capability.

eg: the cRIO LAN ports are NOT auto sensing, so (as per the manual) when you plug the Camera into LAN port 2 on the cRIO you MUST use the ORANGE crossover cable.

Likewise to plug the camera into your laptop, if it's an older laptop, you may ALSO need to use the ORANGE cable.  The good thing is that if your Laptop does have auto-sensing LAN ports, the ORANGE cable will work just fine.

The Driver station DOES have auto sensing ports, so you don't need to use the ORANGE cable if you are plugged into that device.

So if you have the dashboard running, I'd just suggest you plug the camera into cRIO port 2 using the orange cable and see if it works.

Phil.

[Robot Man]

I did as you suggested and the only difference is that the Dashboard did not show any error messages.  Just the message in the camera picture area that says "Timeout in Camera Communications"

I believe that my question about the short gray cable was answered.

The person that put the hardware together used the orange cable between the Linksys and port 1 on the cRIO board.

You said that the orange cable is a crossover so I used it between the camera and port 2 on the cRIO and used the gray cable between Linksys and port 1 on the cRIO board.

Everything works as it did before, including the camera NOT working.

Does it matter if I am using the default "Basic" FRC Robot Project rather than the "Advanced" one?

Thanks

[Rwood359]

We used the instructions in the FRC Programming Guide Section 3 to configure the camera.

Basically you plug the camera into a PC, set the PCs IP to 192.168.0.xxx where xxx is anything but 90 (we used .91).  The documentation in this section is wrong about the PC IP.  It says to use .90.  The camera defaults to .90, which causes a problem.

We than ran the Setup Axis Camera program that was installed on the desktop.  Note that we had to disable our firewall for this to run correctly.  When we received the completed message, we put the PC back to IP 10.x.x.x, connected the

camera to the cRIO port 2 with the orange cable and ran the Servo Camera example VI.  With Camera Display selected, the VI doesn't try to move the servos (it wouldn't matter anyway).  The camera output ran in realtime in the Camera Image box.

[Robot Man]

Thank you all for the suggestions.

I was able to connect to the camera and perform the steps in section 5.5.1 of the Control System Manual.

Then I tested it by downloading the Advanced FRC Robot Project and running it while I used the Dashboard program to display the information.

Thanks, again.

[mgurgol]

I am also having an issue with the servo camera vi.  I have the camera working, I am running in gimbal mode, and I can see the indicators move when I am moving the tracked object, but the servos do not move with the tracking.  The x and y are connected to PWM 5 and 6 respectively.  Is the ServoCamera.vi program supposed to have the servos moving, or does if need to be integrated into the main program.  Any help would be appreciated.

[Philbot]

Have you added the "power" jumpers to the two pins next to the PWM outputs for each of the Servos?

If you haven't added the jumpers, no power is being supplied to the servos.

Check the Digital Sidecar manual for more details.

Phil.

[mgurgol]

Thank you for your prompt reply.  I missed that when originally going through the documentation.