Edu Robot Camera Test Bed

[bear24rw]

Over the summer I wanted to play with the camera some more and also wanted to trying tracking other colors so I decided to make a little robot with the camera, this is what I have come up with:




I made my own adapter so i can attach regular RC batteries to the edu controller...


As for the light Kevin Meissner made me this beautiful tri-color led box:
The three buttons on the side are push-on push-off and active the according colors or red blue and green. There is also a standard female head phone jack on the box for power input.. we made adapter for a 9v battery and a wall adapter. The acuall colors of the light are much more rich and dispersed then how it looks in the pictures...


I plan on adding more sensors and other things soon...

The rest of the pictures can be found here...
http://s25.photobucket.com/albums/c94/bear24rw/

[miketwalker]

I'm very, very much liking that LED box. Very cool little setup, good luck with it.

[Astronouth7303]

If you just need the camera to look around, you can also hook up the servos to the camera, and have it point itself. Then you can use any computer (or controller) with a serial port to give it commands. The entire communication protocol is documented.

One thing I was thinking about doing is making a CMUcam "terminal" interface. You give it commands, and it sends them to the camera. Ideally, could handle any mode, including streaming images and data. (I did actually start it, but I never finished.)

About the EDU bot, that looks very cool. Maybe I'll build something like that to carry my books around next year.

The LED display reminds me of a few projects I saw once on bigclive.com. (Warning: he's a British theater electrician/SFX guy and a pyro nut.) He's got a couple of PCB-based LED boards and such you might be interested in. (or maybe it's too advanced/bright for FIRST uses.)

[bear24rw]

Originally Posted by Astronouth7303

If you just need the camera to look around, you can also hook up the servos to the camera, and have it point itself. Then you can use any computer (or controller) with a serial port to give it commands. The entire communication protocol is documented.

I plan on running the camera off the EDU controller as well as the servos, in the same setup that was used by most team this year in FRC. Once I finish modifying the TTL chip to work with the EDU controller i will be able to start. The main purpose of this project is to track multiple colors as well as have a demo robot... Anyone have any other ideas for sensors or other interesting things i could do? I was thinking maybe putting a range finder sensor mounted right underneath the camera pan/tilt base...

[987HighRoller]

Originally Posted by Astronouth7303

If you just need the camera to look around, you can also hook up the servos to the camera, and have it point itself. Then you can use any computer (or controller) with a serial port to give it commands. The entire communication protocol is documented.

How would you go about doing this without labview? Also what software would be necessary, or would you have to make it yourself?

[Astronouth7303]

Originally Posted by 987HighRoller

How would you go about doing this without labview? Also what software would be necessary, or would you have to make it yourself?

FIRST distributed a Java-based GUI last year. It works, but it's not good.

The entire communication protocol is documented. It's primarily text-based (with a raw mode). Hyperterminal would work, except for the line endings; the camera uses CR-only (\r) line endings. (The options being Windows' CRLF (\r\n), Unix's LF (\n), and Mac's CR (\r).)

You could literally use something like

echo SM 64 | macendings > COM1

to control the camera, assuming the program "macendings" (converts lines to Mac-style) existed.

In one of the documents somewhere, it describes all the commands and the protocol and everything. I just don't know where off-hand.

[bear24rw]

Originally Posted by Astronouth7303

I just don't know where off-hand.

Kevin Watson has all the documentation on his website...
http://kevin.org/frc/

[FourPenguins]

Max, you're my hero. Just thought I'd drop that in.