CMUcam4 sneak preview - Ken and Kwabena
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Ken ambushes Kwabena in this short film featuring the CMUcam4, with the Propeller Microcontroller on the board.
I think Kwabena tells Ken not to post it on the web at the end of the video...
I think Kwabena tells Ken not to post it on the web at the end of the video...
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Kwabena is Kye right? Interning for the summer - I assume?
Looks great! This is a FANTASTIC way to introduce Ardunio users to the power of the Propeller. Awesome!
Any chance of a Gadget Gangster Propeller Platform version of this camera?
OBC
Ah, man, wouldn't it be great if that's all it took!
In addition to his salary, we feed this guy like crazy: Thai, Chinese, pasta, salads and cake. Kwabena has been living in the CMU campus housing on their mega-starch diet for several years. Apparently they know how to make 20 different meals from the same three ingredients. Guess you could say he's been happy in California for the food alone.
We'll miss Kwabena when he returns back to CMU in four weeks. Wouldn't mind talking him out of the last year of his university but we'll be ready to roll when he graduates. He's truly been a fantastic member of our crew.
Ken Gracey
So are kit kats the secret to motivating engineers? You know they released a 'chunky 3' version here that should work three times as well.
-- Gordon
Early price discussions probably didn't take into account that a product must have some kind of return on investment. If manufacturing costs are going to be tightly controlled there's a possibility it would be $99.99, but I think $129.99 is more of a reality.
The version he designed is for the Arduino, so we'll share it with suppliers who work more in that space. Anybody is welcome to make a version more suitable for any 3.3/5V microcontroller and eliminate the shield format. We don't have plans to manufacture it right now (in this case we'd rather be the Propeller supplier) but we'll see how it works out. I'd rather put it into a dual-row SIP arrangement so it can stand upright, or be mounted in that way (like our XBee Educational Adapter).
Ken Gracey
Even at $130 that's almost half the cost of the CMUcam3.
Sparkfun could well fly with this on the Arduino front. It's a nice way to sell Propellers, so it's win-win. I have a feeling Nathan and crew will jump at this one.
I like the dual-SIP arrangement which saves space on a robot. Too many boards are horizontal and take up valuable real estate. It's not always practical to stack things up with shields (for one thing, shields are seldom cooperative in which pins they occupy). If you do go ahead with your own processor-independent version, I'd like to see one with dual Tx/Rx, and that accepts inverted or non-inverted serial. The products that use just a single serial line for Rx and Tx are harder to interface to Arduinos and AVRs.
-- Gordon
Micros without dedicated serial peripherals, such as some PICs and AVRs, can be bit-banged half-duplex fashion to accommodate bidirectional comms on a single pin.
The advantage of multiplexed Tx/Rx devices, of course, is the wide availability of servo headers on various controller boards (e.g. BOE) and the ease of obtaining interconnecting cables.
-Phil
That camera really looks cool! It's great to see the CMUCam family furthered by using the Propeller chip. Not only do you get great performance, but the Propeller finds a home in a very visible product -- a big win for everyone!
-Phil
Will the same connection work for an Arduino via its dedicated UART and Prop Backback?
Understand about the cabling and headers, though these days more and more peripherals are going I2C and you've got four there, so it's hard to escape. I'm seeing a lot of these support both serial and I2C, which I find handy. If I'm already using one I2C device, I've made the bus and now I can just hang off additional devices.
-- Gordon
Yes. Like the ColorPAL, the Backpack includes the pull-up resistor, so all that needs to be added to the Arduous Weenie is a diode.
BTW, multiple ColorPALs can be networked, simply by connecting them in parallel, once their addresses have been programmed into their on-chip EEPROM. The same applies to the Backpack, but it's up to the programmer to provide the address decoding and comms protocol. There's a limit though, which occurs when too many paralleled pull-ups become too stiff to be pulled down by the host.
-Phil
Bean
I have only 1 question. What are the dimensions? because I want to involve the cmucam4 in another project.
RL600
http://www.ovt.com/products/sensor.php?id=5
http://www.ovt.com/uploads/parts/OV9665_PB%20%281.0%29web.pdf
This camera uses the OV9665 with an ADI Blackfin ($195):
http://www.surveyor.com/blackfin/index.html
The stereo version is nice.
The OV9665 is used in several webcams. Getting one of those might be a good way to get hold of one, they are probably only available to OEMs from Omnivision.
Its the exact size of an Ardunio Pro.
Thanks,
We're developing a project that uses the CMUCAM 3.
Now we need more unities of this device or CMUCAM 4, but all the suppliers listed on your web site don't have this device anymore.
We would like to know if there is the possibility of produce the CMUCAM 3 or CMUCAM 4 here in Brazil. If yes, we would like know how we can produce this device.
We'are thinking if you could send us the hardware project and so we would be able to produce the integrated circuit board.
Regards,
It goes on sale this weekend. The CMUcam4 will appear on the CMUcam website this weekend.
---
You can't the CMUcam3 anymore because the camera module is EOL.
Great news Kye!
I'm sure Parallax might pick this up, also.
Hope the final manual will not be in French.
Jim
I have a question regarding the image filtering.
Can you compare differentially from frame to frame or a specific time/frame interval?
Most of the filtering that comes close to this function uses pixel shifting of the same image and that's not quite what I am looking for.
... By taking the differential from frame to frame, everything that is common mode drops out. Anything that passes through means that it is in motion.
This has many security applications, and autonomous robot applications as well, not to mention others.
@Beau - So the CMUcam4 firmware does not support image differencing directly. But, if you hack the firmware you can make it happen. We left out the pixel differencing feature because it uses up to much memory.
The CMUcam4 can stream 80x60 binary images to the host microcontroller at 10 FPS. The host can then store one image as a baseline image and xor it with all new images coming in. This would allow you to detect motion. The host could also store a mask image to logically AND with the xor'ed image to kill certain areas of the image.
Unfortunately, this technique only works for a particular color. So, you would have to choose a range of colors that you wish to examine first before doing this. You could put the CMUcam4 into black and white mode to make the range smaller.
There's 70+ commands in the CMUcam4 toolbox. It can do a lot of stuff if you put your mind to it.
Nice project
Look forward to more detail.
That board looks really compact. What offset between the centreline of the two lenses would you get if you place two side by side (for stereoscopic vision) ?