Wifi-CAM PropBoeXbee BOT

jazzed

Recently I bought a Wifi CAM for my PropBoeXbee experiments.

The CAM is not much bigger than my thumb, and it works on a single CR2 3V battery.
I bought it here: http://www.newspycam.com/Mini_Wirele...4_4988830.aspx
Took a about 15 days to ship from Singapore.

I mounted the CAM on the front of my PropBOE with velcro.
The PropBOE has an XBee interface attached.

Attached is a snapshot of the CAM and XBee console in the SimpleIDE Terminal.
The software designed with Propeller-GCC and is attached below as a SimpleIDE zip.

Drove the BOT around the house while watching the real-time CAM feed in my browser.
I'm looking forward to testing this tomorrow with my grandson Jake and his puppy.

Rsadeika

Looks good jazzed. How strong is the WiFi signal? How far can the boebot go before the video stream starts failing? What does the video stream look like when the boebot is moving, is it smooth streaming or other? Have you tried a night vision run? When will you be producing a vision recognition system, I guess what you really need is some landmark recognition so the boebot can move around the house in auto mode.

Ray

Cats92

Well if you speak of image recognition , or some color blob tracking, it seems not somethging to do with a Propeller.

But if on a bot we connect a Raspberry PI to the Propeller , is it out of reach ?

On the Raspberry are they some C programs able to do the image analysis for the Propeller.

And is it something hard to put together if you are not a Linux user ?

Perhaps the Beagleboard is better than the Raspberry for that ?

jazzed

Hi Ray,

The range for good operation seems to be limited to about 24 feet from the WiFi router. At around 30 feet there is no response on the video. There is no problem with the XBee serial console in that range.

The video quality is good - selectable as 640x480, 320x200, 160x120 compressed or normal.

I'm watching the Atlanta -vs- SF game right now at 640x480 resolution from about 15 feet away. The frame rate is high enough to understand the action. There is nothing like being there of course.

I measured the power from the USB adapter to the CR2 battery pins. It's about 3.3VDC, so I might try powering the CAM from the 3.3V regulator later. Since there is not an obvious way to connect the CAM battery terminal without soldering, I decided to add a USB connector to the PropBOE for powering the CAM in a natural way. That also allows a nicer mounting.

MacTuxLin

Nice looking bot, Steve.