Hi all…
Can you share your pros/cons regarding vision and optical sensors? Why would you use one over the other? Or if you would use both, why?
TIA!
Hey there! I bought both to play with them and make the same determination. The quick answer it that it depends what you want them for.
The vision sensor is a true camera. You can see a picture (its pretty low resolution). You can set up color profiles and it will track those profiles by drawing a square around it. The most advanced thing I use the vision sensors for is mounting them on a simple base bot and having it track a red or blue ball around and follow the ball. The vision sensor can also measure the height of the object, so if it saw two balls, it could sense which one was closer by looking at which one is taller in the image. The setting up and coding takes a little bit more as you have to set up color profiles for any color you want to look for. A bonus is that you can change a setting on the brain and it turns the brain into a wifi hotspot and you can connect to the camera with a phone or computer and see what the camera is seeing.
The Optical sensor just senses color, and the range is pretty limited (1-2 ft max). It is very user friendly and it is plug and play. It only senses color though. So we used this in our change up bot to sense what color ball we were holding. A bonus is that it has a small LED light built in so if it is in a dark place on your bot it can shine enough light to get a reading. You can just open up the sensor on the brain menu and it will give a value for the color that it is seeing, and you can plug that right into your code. Hope that helps!
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The vision sensor can do pretty much everything the optical sensor can and more. However, keep in mind that it is double the price of the optical sensor. So,
this is the best way to word it.
I think this exists on the vision sensor as well, although the color range of the LED is limited. I know that in PROS, you can give commands to the vision sensor to change the color of the LED, rather than having the vision sensor show the strongest signature on its LED.
Anyways, my point is don’t try to use the vision sensor for an application that the optical sensor can accomplish just as easily; you would be wasting about $40.
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