RC won't talk to CMUcam

[HPA_Robotics_13]

Team 833 needs some help with their camera:
We can talk to the camera unit from our laptop via the DB9 connector. But we cannot get the RC to communicate with the camera, even using the default code.

We have disconnected the DB9 link. We have ensured the 7.2V battery is adequately charged.

Any help would be greatly appreciated (our programming team says that they have read all other threads about the camera system and no one else seems to have had this problem).

[HPA_Robotics_13]

A message from my team's programmer's:

Please help!

(personally I know nothing about this stuff, so I can't say whether they're missing something obvious or not... the mechanical stuff is moving along at least... )

[Mike Betts]

Originally Posted by HPA_Robotics_13

Team 833 needs some help with their camera:
We can talk to the camera unit from our laptop via the DB9 connector. But we cannot get the RC to communicate with the camera, even using the default code.

We have disconnected the DB9 link. We have ensured the 7.2V battery is adequately charged.

Any help would be greatly appreciated (our programming team says that they have read all other threads about the camera system and no one else seems to have had this problem).

I would contact IFI about your problem. It sounds like you either have it installed/connected incorrectly or have a defective system.

[russell]

My advice: just mess with it, and in the meantime contact IFI and try to get another camera as it is kind of late in the season to be trying to make something potentially defective try to work.... I have had problems with the data link a few times, once it was a faulty pwm cable, the other times I just messed around a bit, and got it to work.

[thoughtful]

Hi,
I didnt read anything mentioning the TTL port, if the camera is not connected to the TTL port on the rc it wouldnt work so basically the setup is something like this:

PWM1--> Camera: Power
Servo--> Camrra: Direction
TTL-->Camera:Communication

And make sure all the 3-pin wires have the black alligned with the little B on the camera board.

Hope this helps, my $0.02

[RoboMom]

I'm hoping I'm in the right thread as there is a reason the my name is usually followed by the words "non-technical"....
I've got two teams having similar problems.
>>We are experiencing some problems with our camera setup. It seemed to work
with the provided program. Then, when we tried to hook it up to the robot
controller, we couldn't establish a connection. If an effort to debug the
problem, we tried to hook it back up the the computer. Now it won't
connect to that either. We've checked the computer output and the camera
output with an oscilloscope, and they both seem to be working. <<
Any advice? They are not CD users (but should be!)

[jude]

We had an issue with the TTL wiring between the RC and the camera.
The 5V pin on the camera is 2 pins away from ground, and is not 3 pins away like it is on the RC. I think we also had to swap some wires around so the transmit from the RC was going into the receive on the camera.

- jude

[lynca]

be careful, there are a few versions of the camera default code. Try both usrSerial and PIC_serial (something close to these labels). We also had a few start up issues with the camera and it mainly was due to improper wiring at first. Then as we played with the software, the camera sometimes stopped communicating, but at least we new it was software.

[silliewillie]

Originally Posted by HPA_Robotics_13

Team 833 needs some help with their camera:
We can talk to the camera unit from our laptop via the DB9 connector. But we cannot get the RC to communicate with the camera, even using the default code.

We have disconnected the DB9 link. We have ensured the 7.2V battery is adequately charged.

Any help would be greatly appreciated (our programming team says that they have read all other threads about the camera system and no one else seems to have had this problem).

We had this problem too and I think I can help you out. The same thing was happening to us and we found out that the TTL-232 chip was bad. They're 10 bucks off IFI's site, and now everything works fine. The troubleshooter for this told us what was wrong...you can find that through the "TTL-232 Basic Board Troubleshooting" link at the top of this page: http://www.ifirobotics.com/camera.shtml

I hope this helps you out. Good luck.