Raspberry Pi + Camera Module = New Vision System?

[dtengineering]

Originally Posted by team1165wins

I am just wondering if anyone knows whether this camera will work
http://www.goldmine-elec-products.co...?number=G19511

A quick count on my Pi camera shows a 15 wire connector. The link you provide states an 18 wire connector. So, potential driver nightmares aside, I think there might be some hardware issues first.

As for a previous question I'm now getting streaming video, over wifi and internet, of "a few" frames per second at 640x480 using a Logitech USB camera and MJPG Streamer software. There were also some latency issues, but interestingly, those varied from browser to browser. I could have Firefox and Chrome open on the same computer and get different latencies on each browser.

So I don't entirely blame the Pi for that.

I haven't had a chance to play with the Pi camera itself yet... but (at risk of repeating my post to a different thread) will recommend anyone with a Pi take a look at PiFM.

Jason

[alxg833]

I actually had just started work on a project like this after hearing about it from a friend, so I'm glad I found this thread, and I'd love to help! Is there anything specific I could help out with?

Also, a question. what do you think the best way would be to communicate between the Pi and the cRIO? I tried a simple TCP connection and tried to set up some basic communication, and I was getting about a full second of lag. Any ideas why this might be/alternative ways of communicating?

Again, this sounds really interesting, and I'd love to help out!

[yash101]

Do you guys know of any cheap substitute to the raspberry pi camera, that doesn't use USB?

[yash101]

I hate how the pi doesn't support any of the $2 cameras because of it's interface. Why can't the RPi foundation make the camera cheaper. $25 is a lot, especually when you can buy a better substitute at a lower price

[thephpdev]

You can help by checking out the github and making some example programs using OpenCV. It isn't very fast, and I am grasping for any spare time that I can spend on this. So if anyone is able to make good examples that are able to utilize any library that would be very helpful to teams.

[thephpdev]

Originally Posted by yash101

Do you guys know of any cheap substitute to the raspberry pi camera, that doesn't use USB?

You can use the Camera Module that is $25.

As a status update, I started utilizing OpenCV and the UV4L driver to get a /dev/video0 input stream. Under 320x240 I got about 10-12 frames per second while processing and rotating the image (the pi wasn't oriented correctly for my setup), and about 3 FPS under 640x480.

The goal was to find mini retro-reflective targets that resembled the targets from last year. The algorithm was converting to HSV, thresholding, then searching for contours. From there I filtered out the bad polygons and I was left with (mostly, occasionally I would get the outlier) my two targets.

[thephpdev]

I think this is a good time to give another update on my status of the project. Using a C++ V4L interface, I was able to get raw data incredibly fast using a low-level I/O read from a UV4L driver (/dev/video0). From there I made a Mat in OpenCV and thresholded the image, and then located the contours in the image. From there I did some filtering based on two factors: Contour Area, and "Rectangularity." From there I was mostly left with just my vision targets, and I was streaming 320x240 at 30FPS with some idle time, and 640x480 at 12FPS with no idle time (lots of processing done on these raw images).

That isn't where I stopped though, I also went on to make an android app to help calibrate the vision system based on different lighting environments. In order to do this, I chose to make an http server on the raspberry pi with a c++ library (libmicrohttpd) and set brightness, threshold, and contour area values as well as requesting images (PNG).

[yash101]

Great job. Keep up the progress!