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Unread 07-11-2013, 09:57
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Re: Driver station power

Quote:
Originally Posted by yash101 View Post
Looking at the specifications of the propeller ii, it seems though the processor is oowerful enough for vision. Also, I believe they are adding a lot of ADCs and DACs. It will then be an entire computer
Parallax has made several alternations to the Propeller II design the last few years. The Propeller I is already powerful enough to play an 80s classic video game and generate the 4MHz NTSC video signal with some cheap extra parts. It doesn't have a true ADC/DAC per se. It cheats using a trick similar to the BASIC Stamps.

The trick with using the Parallax Propeller (current or otherwise) for vision is to understand how to divide the tasks of the vision system into parallal operations to take advantage of the hub memory and extra cores (cogs). This is itself much more tricky then just getting OpenCV and slapping it on laptop. On Team 11 we've written vision software from the camera driver up but in 6 weeks that's a challenge. Also you start to get into calculus, linear algebra and several other mathematic fields that normally high school students are not yet all that familiar with.

Honestly the best way to overcome vision on the Propeller itself would be to get someone to 'own' the project and let them develop the extensive library of tools you really want to offer it as a 'plug and play' option.

It's possible even with the Propeller I but it's a lot of subtle work and people would be right to ask why do that work when there are other ways already cost effective to achieve the same result.

Other than the camera really the Parallax Propeller is an SVGA, keyboard and mouse capable computer already.
See DEFCON for a fine example:
http://dangerousprototypes.com/2012/...lax-propeller/

All you had to do was solder on the HD-DB15, a PS2 keyboard and PS2 mouse connector and you have a 'PC'.
As you walked around they even talked to each other (it was part of the fun...you needed the rest of the badges to solve the puzzle).

Last edited by techhelpbb : 07-11-2013 at 10:19.