PhotonVision

PhotonVision is the free, fast, and easy-to-use computer vision solution for the FIRST Robotics Competition. You can read an overview of our features on our website. You can find our comprehensive documentation here.

The latest release of platform-specific jars and images is found here.

If you are interested in contributing code or documentation to the project, please read our getting started page for contributors and join the Discord to introduce yourself! We hope to provide a welcoming community to anyone who is interested in helping.

Authors

Documentation

• Our main documentation page: docs.photonvision.org
• Photon UI demo: demo.photonvision.org (or manual link)
• Javadocs: javadocs.photonvision.org (or manual link)
• C++ Doxygen cppdocs.photonvision.org (or manual link)

Building

Gradle is used for all C++ and Java code, and NPM is used for the web UI. Instructions to compile PhotonVision yourself can be found in our docs.

You can run one of the many built in examples straight from the command line, too! They contain a fully featured robot project, and some include simulation support. The projects can be found inside the photonlib-java-examples and photonlib-cpp-examples subdirectories, respectively. Instructions for running these examples directly from the repo are found in the docs.

Gradle Arguments

Note that these are case sensitive!

• -PArchOverride=foobar: builds for a target system other than your current architecture. Valid overrides are:
  • winx32
  • winx64
  • winarm64
  • macx64
  • macarm64
  • linuxx64
  • linuxarm64
  • linuxathena

• -PtgtIP: Specifies where ./gradlew deploy should try to copy the fat JAR to
• -Pprofile: enables JVM profiling

If you're cross-compiling, you'll need the wpilib toolchain installed. This can be done via Gradle: for example ./gradlew installArm64Toolchain or ./gradlew installRoboRioToolchain

Out-of-Source Dependencies

PhotonVision uses the following additional out-of-source repositories for building code.

• Base system images for Raspberry Pi & Orange Pi: https://github.com/PhotonVision/photon-image-modifier
• C++ driver for Raspberry Pi CSI cameras: https://github.com/PhotonVision/photon-libcamera-gl-driver
• JNI code for mrcal: https://github.com/PhotonVision/mrcal-java
• Custom build of OpenCV with GStreamer/Protobuf/other custom flags: https://github.com/PhotonVision/thirdparty-opencv
• JNI code for aruco-nano: https://github.com/PhotonVision/aruconano-jni

Additional packages

For now, using mrcal requires installing these additional packages on Linux systems:

sudo apt install libcholmod3 liblapack3 libsuitesparseconfig5

Acknowledgments

PhotonVision was forked from Chameleon Vision. Thank you to everyone who worked on the original project.

• WPILib - Specifically cscore, CameraServer, NTCore, and OpenCV.

• Apache Commons - Specifically Commons Math, and Commons Lang

• Javalin

• JSON

• FasterXML - Specifically jackson

License

PhotonVision is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Meeting Notes

Our meeting notes can be found in the wiki section of this repository.