On the RoboRIO

Warning

Image processing is a CPU intensive task, and because of the Python Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) we do NOT recommend using robotpy-cscore directly in your robot process. Don’t do it. Really.

Instead, we provide easy to use ways to launch your camera/image processing code from your Python robot code, and it won’t break simulation either! See below for details.

For more information on the GIL and its effects, you may wish to read the following resources:

Note

robotpy-cscore is very new, so if you run into strange errors or crashes please file a bug on github or use one of our support channels.

Note

The following assumes you’re writing your robot code and your image processing code using RobotPy. However, if you’re writing your Robot code using Java, we do have an example which would allow you to launch Python image processing code from your Java Robot code. See this file for details.

Installation

robotpy-cscore can be easily installed with the RobotPy installer. See these instructions for details.

Automatic camera streaming

If you do not wish to modify or process the images from your camera, and only wish to stream a single camera via HTTP to a dashboard, then you only need to add the following to your robotInit function:

wpilib.CameraServer.launch()

That’s it! You should be able to connect to the camera using SmartDashboard, the default LabVIEW Dashboard, or if you point your browser at http://roborio-XXXX-frc.local:1181.

The quick vision example can be found in the RobotPy examples repository.

Image processing

Because the GIL exists (see above), RobotPy’s WPILib implementation provides a way to run your image processing code in a separate process. This introduces a number of rules that your image processing code must follow to efficiently and safely run on the RoboRIO:

  • Your image processing code must be in its own file

  • Never import the cscore package from your robot code, it will just waste memory

  • Never import the wpilib or hal packages from your image

    Warning

    wpilib may not be imported from two programs on the RoboRIO. If this happens, the second program will attempt to kill the first program.

vision file

The first step you need to do is create a file – let’s call it vision.py, and stick it in the same directory as your robot.py file. You can also put it in a subdirectory underneath your robot code, and the robot deploy command will copy it to the robot.

vision.py must contain some function to be called, let’s call it main, and at the minimum it needs to do the following operations:

  • Create a CameraServer instance
  • Start capturing from USB
  • Get a cvSink object that images can be retrieved from
  • Loop and capture images

Here’s a full example:

# Import the camera server
from cscore import CameraServer

# Import OpenCV and NumPy
import cv2
import numpy as np

def main():
    cs = CameraServer.getInstance()
    cs.enableLogging()

    # Capture from the first USB Camera on the system
    camera = cs.startAutomaticCapture()
    camera.setResolution(320, 240)

    # Get a CvSink. This will capture images from the camera
    cvSink = cs.getVideo()

    # (optional) Setup a CvSource. This will send images back to the Dashboard
    outputStream = cs.putVideo("Name", 320, 240)

    # Allocating new images is very expensive, always try to preallocate
    img = np.zeros(shape=(240, 320, 3), dtype=np.uint8)

    while True:
        # Tell the CvSink to grab a frame from the camera and put it
        # in the source image.  If there is an error notify the output.
        time, img = cvSink.grabFrame(img)
        if time == 0:
            # Send the output the error.
            outputStream.notifyError(cvSink.getError());
            # skip the rest of the current iteration
            continue

        #
        # Insert your image processing logic here!
        #

        # (optional) send some image back to the dashboard
        outputStream.putFrame(img)

robot.py

Next, in the robotInit function in your robot.py file, you need to add the following line:

wpilib.CameraServer.launch('vision.py:main')

The parameter provided to launch is of the form FILENAME:FUNCTION. For example, if your code was located in the camera subdirectory in a file called targeting.py, and your function was called run, then you would do:

wpilib.CameraServer.launch('camera/targeting.py:run')

Important notes

  • Your image processing code will be launched via a stub that will setup logging and initialize pynetworktables to talk to your robot code
  • The child process will NOT be launched when running the robot code in simulation or unit testing mode
  • If your image processing code contains a if __name__ == '__main__': block, the code inside that block will NOT be executed when the code is launched from robot.py
  • The camera code will be killed when the robot.py program exits. If you wish to perform cleanup, you should register an atexit handler.

The intermediate vision example can be found in the RobotPy examples repository.

Multiple Cameras

cscore easily supports multiple cameras! Here’s a really simple vision.py file that will get you started streaming two cameras to the FRC Dashboard program:

from cscore import CameraServer

def main():
    cs = CameraServer.getInstance()
    cs.enableLogging()

    usb1 = cs.startAutomaticCapture(dev=0)
    usb2 = cs.startAutomaticCapture(dev=1)

    cs.waitForever()

One thing to be careful of: if you get USB Bandwidth errors, then you probably need to do one of the following:

  • Reduce framerate (FPS). The default is 30, but you can get by with 10 or even as low as 5 FPS.
  • Lower image resolution: you’d be surprised how much you can do with a 160x120 image!

Sometimes the first and second camera swap!?

When using multiple USB cameras, Linux will sometimes order the cameras unpredictably – so camera 1 will become camera 0. Sometimes.

The way to deal with this is to tell cscore to use a specific camera by its path on the file system. First, identify the cameras dev paths by using SSH to access the robot and execute find /dev/v4l. You should see output similar to this:

/dev/v4l
/dev/v4l/by-path
/dev/v4l/by-path/pci-0000:00:1a.0-usb-0:1.4:1.0-video-index0
/dev/v4l/by-path/pci-0000:00:1d.0-usb-0:1.4:1.2-video-index0
/dev/v4l/by-id
...

What you need to do is figure out what paths belong to which camera, and then when you start the camera server, pass it a name and a path via:

usb1 = cs.startAutomaticCapture(name="cam1", path='/dev/v4l/by-id/some-path-here')
usb2 = cs.startAutomaticCapture(name="cam2", path='/dev/v4l/by-id/some-other-path-here')

Generally speaking, if your cameras have unique IDs associated with them (you can tell because the by-id path has a random string of characters in it), then using by-id paths are the best, as they’ll always be the same regardness which port the camera is plugged into.

However, if your camera does NOT have unique IDs associated with them, then you should use the by-path versions instead. These device paths are unique to each USB port plugged in. They should be fairly deterministic, but sometimes with USB hubs they have been known to change.

Note

The Microsoft Lifecam cameras commonly used in FRC don’t have unique IDs associated with them, so you’ll want to use the by-path versions of the links if you are using two Lifecams.

More information