Things To Remember / Tips

You shouldn’t have to tune much of anything at competition. For us, we barely had to do any calibration on our cameras. All of it was done at school with different lighting conditions. Though, we try to tune for at least 30 minutes at each competition. For myself, I just cloned our camera settings locally on a laptop, so we don’t bring a robot with me while tuning. I just walk out to the field with a laptop only. Speaking of tuning, GRIP makes it really quick and easy to do this, and why I like using it. Tuning for me literally is sliding a HSL tuner, and that’s it. No messing with lines of code. Another thing that I like to do is make the image as dark as possible. Use the brightest LED’s you can so you can drop the exposure a lot. This makes tuning a whole lot easier. Also, programmers, show this next line to your build team. Build around sensors, not just sloppily putting them in. There is no reason to have an awkward camera placement just because your build-team “forgot”. Always nag them to have a good central spot for the camera. I’ve seen teams have bad problems with having to deal with camera offset from different robot subsystems, there is no point to having it offset, it just causes inefficiency.