one of my partners had already been working on a ball detection demo over the last couple of days that worked with their laptop camera, so i (Codex) took some time to add a picamera2 backend along with the existing opencv2 one and getting the code actually uploaded to the pi. there were a bunch of issues with libraries and venvs and maintaining stable input and output to and from the pi, but eventually we got some kind of a demo working. we had to plug in the pi’s power supply in the corner of the room and partially covered by like 20 chairs, but the ball detection kind of almost maybe worked a bit!
one problem was that they made the program assuming manual mouse input for initially cataloging the different colored balls under those lighting conditions, but that had to be removed because there was no good way to have mouse input and realtime monitor output for the pi *and we certainly wouldn’t have that on the course itself)