
airwave1206
Hello all, I don't know if I am doing something wrong. I know awhile back DJ made it possible to use dual webcams. I bought 2 difedant cams but can't get both to work at the same time. When I run 2 cams in EZ builder , it freezes them both up. I have one fixed and the other on a pan and tilt. The fix will be used for the robot navigation. The other is for me to look around with. My robot is running its onboard pc with windows7 32 bit. Any suggestions would be helpful.
Here's the link to the video: http://www.ez-robot.com/Community/Videos/Default.aspx?id=LoehvCOhhoY
It's within a Release update video
How heavy is your robot?
Also, was wondering what motors you used for this project?
Thanks for the compliments. L.O.R.A. (Logic Orientated Robotic Assembly) weighs in around 100 pounds. She has a full metal main frame that I welded. The frame holds the dry cell car battery and the motors. The motors are form General Motor power seat. The drive wheels are from a Razor Scooter of some type. L.O.R.A. is real bottom heavy. That makes her real stable. I came up with PVC pipe idea for 2 reasons, light and easy to work with. I don't have an issue building my bots out of metal, I just wanted something easy. My thoughts were to put clear plexi glass on each deck and on the 4 main sides. I was going to put brushed aluminum on the 45 degree corners. Each deck has designated purpose. One deck is fuses and motor control. The next deck is the Jet way mini ITX pc and 40 gig micro hard drive from IPod's, the Ez-B and the sonars. If your bot need a hard drive, look into these micro hard drives on EBay. The hard drives are so small; they are about the size of a business card. They are the smallest spinning disk hard drive out there. These hard drives are classed as 1.8" there half the size of a laptop drive. You have to buy an adapter to connect them to an IDE connector on the pc. If you look up IPod Hard Drive on EBay you will find them. The top deck has the webcam, the Wi-Fi antennas and now a 3M Micro touch LCD monitor. I found the monitor today at the Good Will resale store for $50.00. The monitor is 15" with a built in touch screen, speakers and mic. The best part is the monitor runs off a wall pack that feeds the monitor 12vdc. These types of monitors are all over EBay. Sometimes they call them POS (Point Of Sale monitors like checkout registers) some of them are expensive.
I think I might have figured out my dual webcam problem. My desk top PC is running Windows7 Ultimate and the robot's onboard PC is running Windows7 Home. According to a Google search, there are 3 types of Windows7 with a bunch of extras as you go up to 7 Ultimate. So, apparently, the Ultimate will run 2 webcam and Home version will not. I guess latter I will upgrade the robots PC to 7 Ultimate. If anyone here wants to try it, please post your results so I won't feel like I am crazy! I am going to try it on some other PC's of mine that has other Windows 7 OS's to see if my findings are correct. *confused* *confused*
The Windows version seemed like a perfect reason for your issue... a little concerning since my plan is to also use a net-book with Win7 HP and dual cameras... I just had to test it now to be sure I didn't stall out down the road.
Fortunately (or unfortunately) is does NOT seem to be the issue you are running into...
I just got my bot fired back up and found an old video card that fits the pci slot. Is hard to find those old pci cards. To answer the question, yes it was my jetway mini ITX not having enough horsepower on its onboard video. With this old low grade PNY pci video card, I now can run both cameras with no lag or issues. Now I just have to raise the top section of my bot to accept the video card that now stands up off the motherboard.