JRobot

Hello All,
The first post...cool...

Letting everyone know that the AVRcam is now available for sale, and the source code/schematics will be up under the download section shortly. Stay tuned...

John

John,

Congradulations, the AVRcam looks like a nice alternative to the CMUcam.

A couple questions...

- can we mount the camera head remotely from the AVR board? Specifically, using a 32-pin ribbon cable that is about 12" long?

- Can you ship to Canada?

- For future versions, would you consider adding an SPI port, to allow high-speed downloading of frames to single-board computers like the Gumstix that have a hardware SPI port?

Thanks,
Jon

Hi Jon,

I would guess that you should be able to mount the camera remotely from the AVRcam board, but I haven't determined to what length this would work. Essentially, there would be signals running through those wires oscillating at ~4 MHz. I don't know if standard ribbon cable would be reasonable enough for reliable signal transmission at 12 inches. I think there would also cause be the problem of mounting the camera itself (which doesn't have any mounting holes, if I recall). The AVRcam provides mounting holes in the 4 corners of the board. Out of curiousity, why couldn't you mount the entire board with the camera at your point of interest?

Yes I can ship to Canada.

I have thought about different ways to extract real-time video for viewing while processing the signal simultaneously. If you are using something like the Gumstix, a more straightforward solution would be to up the baud rate of the UART on the AVRcam (the serial port can deliver up to 1 or 2 Mbps IF its talking to a device that can support that throughput). I'm not sure what the specs are on the Gumstix boards, but it may be possible. You could then do a series of "DF" commands to dump a frame. I have had the AVRcam talking to another AVR at a higher baud rate (230 kbps) without any problem. I've also thought about putting a USB chip in parallel with the device that would deliver the video up to the PC in real-time, while not interfering with the actual processing being done by the AVR. For now, doing hi-speed SPI would probably require another chip that would map the digital pixel info into an SPI stream directly. This could easily be done with another mega8 added into the hardware loop.

ajo115 wrote:Out of curiousity, why couldn't you mount the entire board with the camera at your point of interest?

Well, we're building a rover-type robot, and I want to mount the camera on a pan & tilt head which contains other sensors (sonar, IR). Ideally, the pan & tilt head would be relatively small, probably a tube mounted sideways with the camera in the middle, and sonar & IR sensors mounted on each end. To keep the tube at a reasonable size, it would be easier if the AVR board was mounted remotely on the chassis, and just the camera itself mounted inside the tube.



The image above shows a rough view of what I'm talking about...

- Jon

Very cool! Again, the AVRcam board is 2.4" x 1.9", but that may still be too large for your setup.