[Don Reid]

I thought of another approach. After writing my own PC program to work with the CMUCam, I realized that part of the problem in the robot is that reseting the RC doesn't directly reset the camera. It expects the code to reset the camera over the serial link, but if the camera is in an odd mode (or even raw mode), that may not always work.

The only way to really reset the camera is to cycle its power. With the camera powered by a RC PWM port, that doesn't happen.

So why not power the camera through a relay (spike). That way it gets turned off when the RC resets (or when the code wants it to be). The code can then turn on the camera, wait a while, and know its state.

A single relay could be used to power a lot of other sensors (IR etc.) at the same time.