OpenMV Camera

[Foster]

There was a thread in November about the Pixy Camera

I got a note from the team at OpenMV about their new Version 7 Camera. While it's too late for FRC, are there people planning to use the prior OpenMV camera?

Are you planning to use the on-board recognition features or as just an input into something like OpenCV? (Yes, I know that it's 4 weeks until game announcement)

[techhelpbb]

Just noting the resolution of the OmniVision CMOS sensor on the OpenMV is 640x480. While the CMUcam 5 sensor resolution is 1280x800. The CMUCam is further able to do 50 frames a second at 640x400 in color while the OpenMV can do 640x480 in greyscale or 320x240 in color at 30 frames per second.

Resolution and frame rate is not absolutely the most critical issue because a few good images can provide a lot of information. However it is somewhat an issue if you are tracking from a distance and while moving, or targets that are moving at speed.

Honorable mention to OpenMV they have done other work that is more promising:
http://sigalrm.blogspot.com/2013/12/...n-usb.html?m=1

Take note the test environment in the link. Fixed position on the bench short focus.

[Poppeseed]

I got it a few months ago after backing on Kickstarter. I'm not terribly impressed, but I've only messed with it for a few hours.

It crashes regularly with the example projects doing something as basic as color detection. The quality is pretty poor including fps (20-ish), resolution (240x320, during my testing), color levels, rough focus depth, etc. Reflashing the firmware (not the scripts) caused the boards to become unresponsive and forced hard resets multiple times, as well.

I would much rather stick with something more developed like OpenCV on a Raspberry Pi, GRIP, etc. It might take more space and weight, but until OpenMV becomes more mature (if it does), it doesn't seem worth the time. I would rather my team focus on application than debugging issues.