Getting the Camera and Default Code to Work

[nukem]

I know my team spent alot of time on this and basicly it was electrical that screwed us up but just incase your having a problem ill clarify things here. First of all the servos have to be connected directly to the pwm ports on the controller, NOT THE CAMERA!!! Connecting your servos to the camera will let you move them with software that interacts with your computer(like cmucam2gui_fe.jar) but not any code thats actually on the controller. The camera power must come from the digital in/out port on the controller, I have no idea why it says in the manual to use a pwm port from the controller but the camera will get no power from a pwm port and will thus not work. This is were our electrical team really screwed up, remember to first have the TTL-232 Converter plugged in and you do need both batteries on the controller plugged in for it to work. Electrical on our team said we didn't need the backup battery and the servos would not work, once it was in everything worked fine.

I hope this helps you from team 1676.

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by nukem

...The camera power must come from the digital in/out port on the controller, I have no idea why it says in the manual to use a pwm port from the controller but the camera will get no power from a pwm port and will thus not work...and you do need both batteries on the controller plugged in for it to work. Electrical on our team said we didn't need the backup battery and the servos would not work, once it was in everything worked fine.

It says to use a PWM port because that's where it gets the proper power supply: 7.2 volts from the backup battery. A digital I/O port only provides five volts, which is not in spec for the camera's power input, and will not correctly power servos connected to the camera.

[nukem]

Interesting... we hooked it up directly to a 7.2 volt battery and the image came in all screwed up. Today ill have to try that.

[Phalanx]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

It says to use a PWM port because that's where it gets the proper power supply: 7.2 volts from the backup battery. A digital I/O port only provides five volts, which is not in spec for the camera's power input, and will not correctly power servos connected to the camera.

Well, that's interesting. Today for the first time we powered up our camera, and we connected it to a PWM port as per the specs and got no power, no lights, nothing. Then I remembered reading this post and we switched it to a digital I/O port and everything worked like a charm.

This was using LABView connected to the serial port on the camera over a USB to Serial cable, and just the RC, with a fully charged backup battery, and a full charged 12V as the power source.

Seems to work fine for us, at the moment as we are learning and exploring the abilites of the camera.

[nukem]

Well today I plugged the camera's power into the PWM port and the servos into the camera and while the camera does now get power the servos did not move. I put the servos and slot one and two and the camera's power into slow three and everything worked fine. I guess the servos have to be in port one and two but it dosnt matter where the camera's power is plugged into?

[Phalanx]

I'm no expert on this subject since a I myself am learning about this technology just like the rest of you.

As I recall reading from the specs, if you are using the default camera code loaded on the RC, then the servos for pan and tilt, do need to be connected to PWM 1,2 on the RC for it to work and power for the camera can come from any available PWM.

Connecting pan and tilt to the camera board itself only works when using Labview on a PC connected to the serial interface on the camera.

I'll now have to revisit connecting the camera to a PWM port instead of a digitial port for power. We are using last years RC with whatever code we used last year (No camera code) so we may not have power on some of the PWM ports based on the code, I'll try a few different ones and see.