Raspberry Pi + Camera Module = New Vision System?

[thephpdev]

I apologize if this isn't the proper place for this, but this is kind of a mixture of everything about robotics.

As I finished up my summer I was looking for a fun project, and my dad had a Raspberry Pi and a camera module that plugs straight into it via a small ribbon cable. Nobody has made an easy-to-use API for it yet, so I figured that was a fun way to finish up my summer.

My goal for this was to help create a new vision system with these components, because it is very cheap. The rPi costs $35, and the camera costs only $25. Plus the camera is a 5MP camera capable of capturing resolutions much higher than an axis camera, and allows you to process with a CPU that is nearly twice as powerful as the latest cRIO without impacting the robot functions.

The efficiency of this design is incredible, because all the vision processing is offloaded to the rPi! My goal is to try to improve the API for interacting with the camera as much as possible to support C++ and Java. I'll try to also write a white paper to fully explain the idea and how to use it the best way possible in time for people to experiment with it before the build season.

If you are curious, all I have is the github for the C++ API where everyone is welcome to contribute wherever possible.

EDIT: Here is the link to the github.. https://github.com/Josh-Larson/CameraBoardAPI