Viewing the RoboRealm output in SmartDashboard
RoboRealm is a vision processing application that runs on a Windows PC connected to the robot via a network connection. It can read the camera stream, process images and send results back to the robot. It is often desirable to see the results of the image processing on your driver station laptop, but screen real estate is at a premium. You can display images from RoboRealm on the SmartDashboard by using it's internal web server as shown in this article.
Set up the Axis camera in RoboRealm
Start RoboRealm and (1) search for Axis_internet_Camera and (2) add the Axis camera to the program. You'll see a popup of the camera properties. Set (3) the camera IP address (10.TE.AM.11), the (4) Username and Password to FRC and the (5) Resolution to 320x240, and hit (6) Start. You should see the image appear in the RoboRealm window. Hit OK to dismiss the Axis Internet Camera properties.
Enable the RoboRealm web server
Do the following steps to set up the RoboRealm web server which will serve the processed image:
- Click Options
- Activate the RoboRealm web server
- Set the port number to 80
- Set the Max Connections to 5 for testing
- Set the Min FPS to 25
And click OK to save the settings and start the web server.
Verify that the web server is running
Verify the web server is running by opening up a browser on the system and entering the URL: 127.0.0.1. This is the address of this system (localhost) and should show the same image that RoboRealm is displaying.
Run SmartDashboard
Run the version of SmartDashboard from the Windows Start Menu. This is the one in Program Files that has the camera extension installed.
Add the camera to the SmartDashboard display
Add the camera display window to SmartDashboard. If you don't see the Camera in the Add... menu be sure you are running the version of the SmartDashboard that was installed using the SmartDashboard installer located here: http://firstforge.wpi.edu/sf/frs/do/listReleases/projects.smartdashboard/frs.installer.
Set the camera plugin IP address
Verify that the camera IP address is set correctly by:
- Selecting "View" then "Editable" to make the camera image properties accessible. Then right-click on the image and select Properties. Set the system IP address in the Camera IP Address field. This will be viewing the RoboRealm web server just as in the previous steps with the browser.
View the RoboRealm image
You should now see the RoboRealm image in both the Web Browser and in SmartDashboard at the same time.
