Attaching the CMUcam to the Vex controller

[billbo911]

Originally Posted by Culvan Van Li

I made a custom cable to connect the TTL serial to the VEX ports that are next to the digital16 port....and I've got a second laptop connected to the RS232 serial port on the camera monitoring it with Procom plus.

The servos start panning all over the place and I get "searching..." messages. The camera never seems to lock onto anything (incluging my green target).


Andy

To quote one of the "Myth Busters" "There's your problem right there"

The CMU Cam can not drive both the TTL and RS232 connections at the same time. So, when the controller never receives tracking data from the camera, it just keeps searching. Try disconnecting the RS232 to the second laptop. You should start seeing better performance.

[yara92]

Hi Andy!
I tried this long way I Confused with the friends helping me how to connect and different codes but I did not succeed the camera dos not Tracking.
So may be you did not given up and you succeed to work it out.
Please try to send me any information met help. I'm struggling to get it working with the vex kit.
Mohamed team 1946

[Culvan Van Li]

I did make some more progress on this, but I haven't worked on it for months. I was able to get the camera to find objects. My previous setup worked (even the part about having two laptops connected at the same time.) I can't get the tracking code to properly control my servos, but that's a different problem.

My problem was that I was calibrating the search color in Labview and it was defaulting to RGB mode. The default camera code from Kevin Watson is in YCrCb mode. It will work with both set the same way, but YCrCb is closer to the way the camera sees the world. RGB is basically calculated from the YCrCb data. You will probably have better results using YCrCb.

The setting is controlled inside the COMA register on the camera. It's only one bit so you will change it by adding or subtracting that bit (the number 8, I believe). I found the following thread that clued me into my problem.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...highlight=COMA

Hope this helps.

Andy