Supported Hardware

PhotonVision is developed and tested on a number of Commercial, Off-the-Shelf (COTS) vision processing hardware solutions.

Supported Cameras

PhotonVision works with Pi Cameras and most USB Cameras, the recommendations below are known to be working and have been tested. Other cameras such as webcams, virtual cameras, etc. are not officially supported and may not work. It is important to note that fisheye cameras should only be used as a driver camera and not for detecting targets.

PhotonVision relies on CSCore to detect and process cameras, so camera support is determined based off compatibility with CScore along with native support for the camera within your OS (ex. V4L compatibility if using a Linux machine like a Raspberry Pi).

Pi cameras are always recommended over USB cameras as they have lower latency and better performance compared to your average USB Camera.

Note

Note that there are many CSI based OV9281 cameras but this is the only one that has been tested by the development team.

Note

If you test a camera and find that it works with PhotonVision, we encourage you to submit that camera to the performance matrix below.

Warning

The following cameras / setups are known to not work: * Using two of the same USB cameras does not currently work because it is hard to identify the two different cameras.

  • Most Logitech cameras (specifically the Logitech C270 HD Webcam (PN: 960-000694)) will not work with PhotonVision.

  • The PS3Eye needs a workaround to be usable, for more information see our Known Issues page

  • Most laptop integrated webcams

Supported Coprocessors

  • Raspberry Pi 3 / 4, with the newest variants of each being preferred (3B+ and B, respectively).

  • Raspberry Pi 4 is preferred for all forms of target tracking.

  • Orange Pi 4 / 5 will have better performance but will require more work to get working.

  • Mini PCs (such as Beelink N5095) have been testing and show significantly better performance than a Raspberry Pi, but require extra effort to wire to the robot / get set up. More information can be found in the set up guide here.

  • Other coprocessors can be used but may require some extra work / command line usage in order to get it working properly.

Performance Matrix

Please submit performance data to be added to the matrix here:

Support Levels

Support Level

Support Qualities

Hardware

Fully Supported

  • Full discord help

  • All features will work

  • Everything will be kept up to date

  • Gloworm

  • Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi 4 with the official Pi image with the Pi Cam or CSCore compatible USB Cameras

Compatible

  • No guarantee of support on Discord

  • Major features will work

  • We hope to keep things up to date

  • Linux (aarch64, armv7, x86_64)

  • Windows (x86_64)

Unsupported

  • Told to use something else

  • Won’t try to make these work/update them

  • No guarantees

  • macOS

  • Anything not listed above