Camera Feed Through Xbee

jakethesnake

Hello
Anybody know if you can send video through the Xbee? [using the camera parallax sells stock #28317]
Thank You!

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

In general, XBee would be too slow for real-time video. But the "camera" you cited, the TSL1401-DB, uses a linear array sensor that has a single row of 128 pixels. In that particular case, yes, the XBee would work just as well as any other serial interface for transferring the pixel data.

-Phil

Duane Degn

As Phil said, video isn't going to be doable over a XBee link.

You could send images over the link. You could use one of those JPEG cameras and send the JPEG file over the XBee link. You'd need a way of putting the picture back together (and a way to display the JPEG).

Another option is to use very low resolution video (and probably a slow frame rate). I've been working on a project using Hanno's video capture method. For fun I made a really low resolution display with 120 red LEDs. I can display the image from a video camera on this low res display. The brightness of each LED is given by an 8-bit number (byte). 120 bytes are needed for each image (or frame) displayed. Instead of 30fps lets shoot for 15fps. That gives us 14,400 bits per second to transmit. I don't know if a XBee can transmit 14.4kbps. I think if you adjusted some of the settings you might be able to get it to transmit that fast. I'm pretty sure the nRF24L01+ Nordic modules could easily keep up with that rate. It's hard to tell what you're looking at with only 120 grey scale pixels though.

A much easier solution would be to buy a video transmitter and receiver from Deal Extreme.

Duane

jakethesnake

How would I set up the JPEG camera? That sounds like a fun piece of tech
-jakethesnake

Franklin

How would I set up the JPEG camera?

did you read the documentation? Once you do if you have questions ask.

jakethesnake

Which documentation?

Franklin

The documentation for the camera referenced by Duane in his post.