Dj Have You Seen This Camera?

rgordon

USA

Asked Oct 2013 — Edited Oct 2013

I stumbled across this awhile back. It's called Pixy. Made by Charmed Labs and Carnegie Mellon University. It not only can track multiple colors but can track 100 objects at the same time. Very fast and can use color codes to identify objects.

$75 including shipping

Just thought you might be interested.

Click To Watch Video

Pixy

Upgrade to ARC Pro

Unleash your creativity with the power of easy robot programming using Synthiam ARC Pro

Compare Pro Features View Subscription Plans

DJ Sures

PRO

Synthiam

#1 Oct 2013

You won't want to use that because it isn't configurable. It will not work with the EZ-B v4 out of the box. Our new camera is amazing and I would highly recommend using ours

Read more about: EZ-B v4 Camera

rgordon

USA

#2 Oct 2013

OK thanks for the info. If it does not work with EZ then I definitely don't want it.

DJ Sures

PRO

Synthiam

#3 Oct 2013

Keep in mind, that anything will work with the EZ-B if you make it. By default, it doesn't - but it won't be hard to make it work. The image location data is transmitted by the UART, which can be connected to the EZ-B v4. It does not stream the actual video image... only the location of the object. So, you will not actually see what the robot sees on the screen.

It does about 1/100th of ARC's video processing does. Kind of like putting a Ford Pinto motor into a Ferarri

DJ Sures

PRO

Synthiam

#4 Oct 2013

50 fps? Your robot will go bonkers! Absolutely not. Our camera will absolutely not track at 50 fps, and neither should theirs. If they feel like using that as a promotional value, then they have zero experience in robotics. Think how quick your robot will react to objects if it was 50 fps LOL. That is why we have the default set to ~10fps in the ARC software.

If the frame rate is too high, the servos and motion are unable to keep up to move to the location of the object. Your robot will look like it has the shakes. Try it and see

There are reasons why we do what we do... We talk less and do more. Seems these other products are created by university students who demo in one example with no real world customer experience to backup their technology decisions. We crowd-source every feature and fine tune parameters based on all of your feedback, rather than tell you how it "should" be.

DJ Sures

PRO

Synthiam

#5 Oct 2013

I guess you could technically do 50 fps but only use data from every 2nd or 3rd frame. It'll be a bit choppy because the frames being processed will take more time - unless you could copy the memory quick enough and analyze the data in another thread. That's how the QR Detector works... But the detected object on the screen wouldn't be up to date, that would be the only visual problem.

I think you'll be happy with the new EZ-Robot Camera

It is way better than the old camera we used to sell. As for the frame rate, it does share the same WiFi connection as the data. There's a surprisingly high amount of data with low latency requirements. Optimizing the EZ-B v4 was quite challenging... It is doing so much!

There are 3 x 32-Bit Arm processors with the EZ-B v4 setup...

1) One 120Mhz 32-Bit STM32F2 Arm Processor runs the EZ-B I/O and PWM/ADC/I2C/UART
2) One 72Mhz 32-Bit Microchip Pic32MX Processor running the WiFi, WebServer and TCP Stack
3) One 80Mhz 32-Bit STM32F3 Arm Processor runs the EZ-Robot Camera

It's a pretty awesome setup if you ask me!