Hi
Im new to building robots and starting work on my omnibot build. I am a mechanical engineering student so making the robot mechanically has been a blast but actually making it talk to the computer will be interesting lol I'm working on the camera right now and am having a little trouble. I've read other posts and wired it up so I do not have to utilize the lipo battery. I set the digital port and can activate/deactivate the blue led using the digital control. When I go into the control, camera device, I cannot find the wireless camera listed. I have the webcam, ar drone, and rover. I tried connecting the camera between the USB and computer to see if there was an installation that had to be done but nothing seemed to happen. Any suggestions would be really appreciated :D
Oh and I think a search window for the forums would be a great addition. It's not too bad now to go back and look things up but eventually it may be a real pain to sift through each forum.
Thanks
There is a search window for the forums. It is right above the list of recent posts on the right hand side :)
When you plugged in the "dongle" from the camera into USB it should have installed drivers. The USB port on the camera itself is just for charging. If it didn't install drivers, first thing would be to just try another USB port if you have one. If not, then it gets a bit more complicated since you need to go into your device manager and see if there is a non-working device, uninstall it, and then try to re-install the drivers.
If you are using Windows 7, you should not need the CD that came with the camera, although it does have a nice little utility called AmCap that can be used for testing the camera (or any Windows camera). If you have XP, you probably do need the drivers from the CD, and you also need to upgrade to Windows 7 :)
Alan
Thank you for the reply!
I should've looked closer for the search button there. oops eyeroll
I have windows 7. I uninstalled the camera software from the computer and installed it again. Now I can select the USB video device. However when i select it, the red grids appear but no picture.
Silly but did you turn the camera on?
yes both the red and blue lights come on. when i turn activate the digital port the blue light comes on and a little message on the bottom of the screen saying that the camera is activated but no picture or readings in the camera device. when i deactivate the digital port the blue light goes out. That seems correct? and the red light is on as long as the ez-b has power
Did you install the driver from the cd or let windows detect it?
seems "sometimes" people have issues with the cd driver. i don't know why that is. it's best to let windows install it. i should just stop shipping the cd all together :)
@robot56 I am having the same issues with my camera. Any assistance is appreciated.
Plug in USB to.USB adapter included and let.it charge about 4 hours , it won't work on low batt.
I read that the battery was sometimes causing problems when wired to the ez-board and that they were cutting them out. I went ahead and cut out the battery so I'm only using power from the ez-b. I used the disk to install the program. I will uninstall it from the computer and let windows detect it and see if that resolves the problem.
If I plan to add an on board computer to my robot could I plug a webcam with a cord straight from the USB to the board to bypass the ezb? Like using the webcam that comes in my laptop which is working awesome. If that could work I might buy the motherboard sooner than expected lol
If your using an embedded computer then yes you can use a usb webcam without the trigger from the ez-b. Do watch out what type of web cam it is cause people have had problems with HD cams, I have an internal HP TrueVision HD on my labtop and it works fine with ARC.
Logitech cams seem to be the best brand for USB plug n play cams , they even have one that has a pan and tilt gimble which I bet would be really cool for ezb
Im going to look into the logitech and hp truevision hd. I might have a cheapo webcam sitting around somewhere that might be worth trying too. This is a little off topic from the camera but i was thinking about embedded computers. An embedded computer might be easier for sounds because one could use speakers plugged into the motherboard instead of having a mp3 trigger. My questions is once the robot is all buttoned up and done, how do you pair the computer and ez-board? Would you need a seperate screen, mouse, and keyboard to set everything up? I don't know too much about computers but this was one of my questions about using embedded computing.
I did a embedded computer , not hard at all. Then you can trigger mp3 play out the speaker out from board. Yes for initial setup and software installation you must have keyboard and mouse plugged in. I just put my plugs behind the accessories door
After initial setup you can remote desktop for tweeking , adding features and things like that. Because if you have an itx board you probably want your bot to be autonomous. Mini itx boards are 6.5 x 6.5 inches so they can fit in really small areas. Plus many micro atx boards have WiFi, sound and Bluetooth built in like mine :). You can get atom dual core motherboards cheap and ultra low power consumption.