Install camera

chugarchezy

I purchased a CCD black and white camera and I want to install it on a crust crawler but I need some schematics. Can someone help me with this.

Mike Green

You will have to hunt for your own schematics. Start with the manufacturer's website.

Have a look at the CMUcam that Parallax sells. It's typical of what's needed to interface
most CCD cameras to something like a Stamp. There are actually two microcontrollers
involved, one attached to the camera itself to do some image processing, object recognition,
etc. and one that sits between the first microcontroller and the Stamp. This one makes the
camera's functionality available via a serial port to the Stamp. Part of the issue is that the
Stamp doesn't have enough memory to do any kind of image buffering or processing and
the other microcontrollers take some of that burden off the Stamp. The 1st microcontroller
also handles a lot of the time sensitive processing to get the image out of the CCD array
into some kind of buffer where it can be manipulated.

sdy

You're camera will need TTL serial output. Like chugarchezy said, you're camera will need on-board video processing. No way can the stamp process a video signal.
The CMUCam has software built in it. It takes commands that cause it to locate a color blpd and sends back a serial data stream telling the center of the blob, corners of the bounding box, size of target in pixels and a confidence level. Other data packets re available.
My BoeBot reads the xLocation from the data stream and turns the servos until the target is centered, thus tracking a light, a blue LED spotlight in my case.

Chris Savage

This thread is being moved from the BASIC Stamp Forum to the Robotics Forum.

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Chris Savage
Parallax Tech Support