Tachyon
Since before I discovered EZ-Robot I had it in my head that an Android phone would make a great component of a robot. After all, it's a highly compact collection of computing power, sensors, camera(s) etc. It's open source, easily hackable, and seemed like the perfect companion to a robot system.
Since I upgraded to a Galaxy Nexus, I now have my awesome little Nexus One available for experiments. I started that experiment today.
I installed one of the many remote PC webcam apps available on the Play Market on my trusty Nexus One. In this case I used DroidCam, but I'm sure there are several that will do and I plan to test several.
Anyway, for now I found that because DroidCam installs itself as a generic video device on Windows, it works fine as a video source for ARC.
I'm going to experiment with motion and colour tracking etc. and see how it goes.
I'd LOVE to see an Android app to tie in with ARC. After all, I have a small package with a ton of sensors available. It would be great if I could read and use those from ARC. GPS, Accelerometers, light sensor, orientation sensor, etc.
You can see the results of my camera test below.
Ok, I also tried SmartCam and it seems to work as well. I am noticing though that ARC seems to be hard coded to use the resolution of the camera that ships with the EZ-Robot kit. I wonder if @DJ Sures would mind updating that in a future release of ARC?
Anyway, if you set your camera to capture at the same resolution, it works fine. Otherwise the camera quadrants are stretched to the upper left corner as shown in the first picture.
Now I have to come up with a cool way to mount my Nexus One on a robot.
Why didn't I came up with that idea?
I had problems setting up the cam that came with the EZ-Bot Kit and had to wait a week or so for a new one. It never occured to me to use my good old HTC desire as a web cam ... very nice idea ... I have to try that as well :)