ChipKIT max 32 + camera

Created Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:17:16 +0000 by Flo_Geek

Flo_Geek

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:17:16 +0000

Hello

I want to make a robot with a video camera control by android phone and WiFi. And I want to know if the ChipKIT max 32 can mange a video stream with a correct FPS??

Tanks PS:I'm french so sorry for my english.

EmbeddedMan

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:40:40 +0000

The chipKIT board doesn't have a built-in camera driver hardware peripheral (like TI's OMAP processors and Analog Device's BlackFin, among others), so you won't be able to talk to a parallel data camera (like cell phone cameras) at full data rates.

An easier option may be to get a camera that outputs JPEG images over serial connection (like the CMU-CAM series - [url]http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cmucam/[/url]) or others. You can then request a frame, pull it into the chipKIT over serial, and then send it out over WiFi.

However, unless you need the chipKIT to actually do processing on each video frame, there are many easier solutions to simply putting a WiFi camera on your robot. For example, the Surveyor SRV-1 ([url]http://www.surveyor.com/[/url]) is one option - there are many more.

While the PIC32 on the chipKIT is able to do limited video frame processing, it is not really fast enough to do full motion video processing.

*Brian

Flo_Geek

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:54:59 +0000

A video camera like Caméra JPEG microCAM Sériél - RS232 4D Systems or Caméra JPEG microCAM Sériél - TTL 4D Systems??

And how many FPS can I hope to have with this card??

KM6VV

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 19:25:29 +0000

The CMU-CAM is tough to get. I finally canceled my order and bought a Surveyor last year. I tried to order an IMU and GPS module this year, and ended up canceling it as well.

CMU-CAM series - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cmucam/)

Surveyor SRV-1 (http://www.surveyor.com/)

Finally ordered SparkFun IMU Razor and a different GPS.

Alan KM6VV

whoover

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 17:39:22 +0000

Alternatives:

Search EBay for OV7725 like this one. They go for about $35 (including shipping) and work with the Wire library. It uses the same camera as Blackfin that sells for $55. The OV7725 is a CMOS camera and the specs can be found here.

Seeed has a CCD Camera for $45 that supports JPEG and has an internal buffer so you can chunk the data across your connection. They have some Arduino sample code to store it on an SD card on their wiki. I got the code working using a Uno32 over an XBee Pro. It took about 3 seconds to transfer it to my PC @ 19200 for QVGA and about 5 seconds for VGA (with a lot of overhead that could have been optimized). BTW, they used to sell this one for $35- still can get one from here for $40.

I know this is not video, but if you may the multiple frames would suffice?