Microsoft USB Camera Freezing on Pi

[techhelpbb]

I will also mention if you want a lot of frames, but less resolution, you might consider the Playstation 3 Eye USB camera. It is still available used at GameStop.

The PS3Eye reduces the color depth and resolution to 640x480, still has sensitivity in the IR range, but can fully flood a USB2 port to 100+ frames a second. This makes it ideal for capturing quick movements (like a ball in the air) with good close range and degrading distance accuracy. There are good propreitary Windows drivers that support multiple cameras at the same time and recognition. There are adequate Linux drivers through V4L and GSPCA, but getting GSPCA on your Linux platform for some embedded platforms requires source/packages. It works fine on the Kangaroo, ODroid, BeagleBones and Raspberry Pis. I hear it works on the NVidia embedded platforms. I know if you get the GSPCA stuff on the RoboRio it works with a reduced frame rate.

In the past FRC11 considered mixing a 1080p webcam and PS3Eye to do certain tasks. The PS3Eye being good to track projectiles and the Logitech webcam being used to line up on fixed targets and avoid some collisions. Keep in mind we were using a full laptop on the robot at the time stripped down to just the base and at less than the $400 cost requirement, so we had multiple USB2 ports and 2 CPU cores. Could also be done with multiple co-processors.

At the moment I know of no other cheap webcam that can achieve this framerate. There are more expensive (> $120) options but remember it is on the robot in harms way.