Hacker News Reader

I don’t know whether you’re discussing FIRST Tech Challenge or FIRST Robotics Competition, but I know that at our team’s competition they specifically asked if we had any GoPros in real-time mode and the remote software prevented viewing any cameras and driving at the same time. Otherwise I think this strategy would have been a huge help to us!

View on HN

FRC. Yeah, they're understandably concerned about what happens if every single robot has 1 or 2 extra wireless communications channels. They announced at least once to the audience to turn off any hot spots as they're getting tremendous noise and channel swapping for the RoboRios.

If you use a RoboRio and wpilib, there's first class support to feed USB camera into the Rio, through the official match/field wifi for your robot, and to your laptop's Game UI.

They also specifically limit teams to low bandwidth to guarantee quality of service to each robot.

The FRC camera rabbit hole is deep - we run a fully custom gstreamer setup this year, plus a full ML/hybrid vision pipeline and two Apriltags cameras on Photonvision.

In years past, we even designed our own camera scheme with an implicit surfaces calculator so we could drive with/ship wireframes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com