Transmitting pictures (obviously low quality unless i can do better) over a xbe

noobmuncher

Hello,

So I am interfacing a BS2 with a XBee Pro 900 RPSMA from sparkfun http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9099 and interfacing that with another identical xbee which i am using a XBee Explorer USB http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8687 to interface to my computer.
So here in lies the portion I would like help with:
How can I CHEAPLY use one of the cameras from sparkfun to send images from said camera so that it pops up on my computer. Video would be nice, but thats unrealistic over a xbee so I will just have it sending pictures one after another as soon as it can (which might be quite slow if I can get a decent resolution out of them).

Any help is great, idealy i would use some thing like this
www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8739
or
www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8668

And because I have a feeling someone will probably suggest it, NO i do not want to use a $100 or more CMU-cam unless I absolutely have no other choice.

Thank you!

Post Edited (noobmuncher) : 10/28/2009 11:46:45 PM GMT

Mike Green

The 2nd camera from SparkFun would be better because it can do the JPEG encoding to reduce the size of the file that has to be transmitted. Even with the JPEG compression you're talking about a lot of data. A major problem you'll run into is that the BS2 is not capable of handling this amount of data or the speed required. It only has storage for 26 bytes of information and many basic operations take 200us or so to execute. The way the CMUcam works is to offload most of the processing to another microcontroller and cut down markedly the size and resolution of the image that's captured. The cheapest way to handle one of these cameras would be to use a Propeller instead of a BS2. You'd still have problems with the limited (32K) memory available for buffering the image although several people have been designing boards with a Propeller and a 512K static RAM. Cluso99's RAMBlade might be a good solution or Bill Henning's Morpheus might work. Look back maybe 100-150 threads in the Propeller Forum for threads on these.

noobmuncher

Would this one help at all? http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9334
Btw thank you Mike, I would prefer to do this using a BS2 though even if I must eventually end up buying a CMU1 or something.