Hello, I was referred here by a post on some google groups discussion, you may recall we are the group that is building the robo hockey project.
Ok I will be honest, in all my years of schooling, this is the first I've had experiance with image processing via a camera, from what I have read on the AVRcam manual, and other literature throughout the sites, here are my few questions.
First, I know that the camera is capable of detecting a bright orange puck on a black top air hockey table. That said, what will it do with the data? If the table is 4 feet long, I'll need to mount the camera a few feet above the table to get the whole table, will the resolution limits hurt my frame rate? By how much?
We need to acquire data fast enough so that we can calculate future position, and send this information to another team, who will be controlling the actual device to block/return the puck.
What kind of data will I get? I am not entirely sure what the results would be, will the device define a coordinate system based on the bounding box, and once that is set, will I be able to extrapolate coordinates to use to calculate future position?
I noticed while reading the manual the command "ET" for enable color blob tracking. Is this the command I need? This is what I assume it would do, however I feel I may be way off, for it seems to be too simple...
I give it the command ET, it returns to me the parameters, in the format seen in appendix B of the manual, is this set by me before hand? Bounding Box and Color tracked seems like something I would input, why is it ouputing it to me? If it is preset, is this just an acknowledgement? Does it then proceed to stream to me coordinates in relation to the bounding box? If it does stream coordinates, how do I get those coordinates into something that I can use to process the data, the only other experiance I have is some basic microcontroller work, where we interfaced a microcontroller with a C compiler and used the inputs to do small calculations, is something similar availble to us with AVR cam?
Sorry for the barrage of questions, while there is a lot of material on the internet regarding robotics, it can be overwhelming when you don't know the basics. If you understand my quesetions correctly, I'll check back for a reply, if not please let me know what you need more clarification on and I'll try to shoot back a response asap.
Thanks for the time
naveed.