You gotta check out CMUcam if you haven’t yet. It can be controlled via a serial communications
to processors such as PIC, CUBLOC, Basic Stamp, Make Controller, and etc…

It’s a camera that was designed by Carnegie Mellon and has been around for awhile so it might be
a good solution to go with instead of starting all over from scratch.

The website explains as follows:

CMUcam is a new low-cost, low-power sensor for mobile robots. You can use CMUcam vision system to do many different kinds of on-board, real-time vision processing. Because CMUcam uses a serial port, it can be directly interfaced to other low-power processors such as PIC chips.

At 17 frames per second, CMUcam can do the following:

• track the position and size of a colorful or bright object
• measure the RGB or YUV statistics of an image region
• automatically acquire and track the first object it sees
• physically track using a directly connected servo
• dump a complete image over the serial port
• dump a bitmap showing the shape of the tracked object

Using CMUcam, it is easy to make a robot head that swivels around to track an object. You can also build a wheeled robot that chases a ball around, or even chases you around. In the Gallery, you can see pictures and videos of some of the robots we and others have built with CMUcam.

Tags: 8bit, basic, camera, cmucam, controller, Cool, cubloc, DoItYourself!, embedded, Hack, make, mcu, Microcontroller, microprocessor, PIC, robots, stamp, Video, Zedomax

This entry was posted by max on Monday, November 27th, 2006 at 8:23 pm and is filed under Cool, DoItYourself!, Hack, Microcontroller, Robots, Video.
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