Propeller and a 5V pinhole cam

bboy8012

I was wondering can anyone point me to the right direction to find information and examples on getting the propeller to stream video from·a cam. My over all goal is to use a 2 propellers, 1 5v pinhole cam, 2 xbee modules to stream video wirelessly. For aerial video. Trying to develop a generic UAV apllication in java for the propeller for model airplanes/jets. I have the java applications complete for serial comms between the propeller and my pc.

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Hunger hurts, starvation works!

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

If your goal is just to stream video to a ground station, you don't need a Propeller to mediate the process. Any number of wireless video transmitters available from the security video places will do the job. From your ground station, the NTSC video can be streamed direclty into your PC with a suitable USB video capture device.

-Phil

bboy8012

I know but i would rather gain the knowledge of how to do it, and just see if I can make it cheaper then what they sell them for

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Hunger hurts, starvation works!

deSilva

bboy8012 said...
I know but i would rather gain the knowledge of how to do it

Bravo! This is the spirit. You wil have to learn a lot to accomplish this. First understand how a video signal looks like in every detail, second understand how those signals are generated by the propeller. Third read all the threads discussing issues and limitations of video capturing with the Propeller.

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

Okay, understood, and I respect your initiative! That said, however, neither the processing power of the Propeller nor the baudrate of the XBee modules are sufficient to keep up with streaming video — at least not full-resolution color. It may be possible with a B/W camera at reduced resolution, however.

I don't say these things to discourage you. Quite the contrary! But it's important to set your sights on a goal that might reasonably be accomplished. I don't think anyone has succeeded yet in capturing and processing NTSC video with the Propeller in real time. It's a quest worth pursuing, though, and you might well be the first!

-Phil

VIRAND

An LM3914 bar graph volt meter chip may be a convenient makeshift ADC for live video, especially in dot mode
it is easily converted to 3 or 4 bit binary (11 levels) and seems to be very fast, ok for B&W video.

Also, (for another idea)
CCD chips for which you can find the datasheets are adaptable to the Propeller, the main challenge is voltage
level shifting. If you slow down a CCD chip, it may become more sensitive to light also. (I'm thinking of direct
control of the CCD now, rather than grabbing from the video output of a complete security camera).
This idea uses CCDs more like webcams or digital cameras than video spy cameras.
Save the lenses and CCDs from old cameras in case they are useful for this.

deSilva

Inded, VIRAND, these are the places where the Propeller can become a very intersting piece of "video" interconnection:

(1) Slow scanning 1Hz rather than 60 Hz
(2) still pictures (once per second)
(3) reduced resolution (128x128 B/W)

This can make much sense, especially when some external hardware is in the game, as the CCDs as such, or pre-treatments as computing the interframe differences, etc.

simonl

@PhiPi: You're teasing me again aren't you! Any news on PropCAM?

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Cheers,

Simon

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www.norfolkhelicopterclub.co.uk
You'll always have as many take-offs as landings, the trick is to be sure you can take-off again ;-)
BTW: I type as I'm thinking, so please don't take any offense at my writing style

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

Simon,

Sorry, no real news: it's still queued up. I'm contemplating a different Propeller driver board for it from the full-blown MoBoProp. This would make it usable with a wider range of Parallax's products — assuming I can keep the cost down.

-Phil

simonl

That's OK Phil, I know how it goes: 1) hey, I've got a great idea, 2) Wow, I can really do this, 3) Yup still exciting, and I can add this too, 4) Darn that day job!

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Cheers,

Simon

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www.norfolkhelicopterclub.co.uk
You'll always have as many take-offs as landings, the trick is to be sure you can take-off again ;-)
BTW: I type as I'm thinking, so please don't take any offense at my writing style

stamped

Phil, I am also keen on the PropCam. I have been looking at heaps of different cams for the Prop and loosing hair in the process. First I was looking at USB stream, then saw the complexity and time it would require, so that threw that idea out the window. Then I looked at Wi-Fi cameras which were expensive and tended to have poor resolution. More recently I have looked at the serial cameras in some cell phones (detailed here somewhere), which looked good for about 10minutes until I saw people had generally poor results. I run one of the cheap wireless security cameras but it is rather poor in that the picture is not great, cordless phones interfere with it and it takes down my Wireless internet as I can't tune the TX/RX!

So the PropCam is almost the only hope!

Question; What sort of resolution are you aiming for and what is the likely time-frame?

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

stamped,

The resolution is 128 x 96 pixels, 4 bits deep. Here is the link. The date on my original post should give you some clue about the time frame: "real soon now". It's "just" a matter of documenting the thing both for the user and for production and building a test jig for it — in other words, turning a working device into a product.

-Phil