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Wireless Camera Recomendations
Todd Echterling from United States [1 posts] |
13 year
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Hi,
I am investigating using Roborealm in a college upper level robotics class. We will use lego mindstorms as the the body of our bots. Lejos or MSRS for coding, and of course Roborealm for the vision aspect. We have a lab of 27 stations and will have the same same bots and cameras.
But our question/problem is finding a good camera solution. Cause we need a wireless solution and powered by battery so that the bot is not tethered to the computer via usb.
If anyone can suggest such a solution please let me know. Or provide us with some guidance on choosing a camera.
Thanks in advance.
-Todd
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Anonymous |
13 year
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Todd,
That's a difficult question as I assume you would prefer the least expensive but most reliable camera? ... and unfortunately that doesn't really exist. For the form factor we have used the inexpensive NTSC cameras that work reasonably well but cause a lot of interference even at close proximity. Plus they WILL interfere with each other so you probably cannot use them all at the same time.
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=MINIWL-CAM-900-PB&cpc=SCH
Keep in mind you STILL need a digitizer to get the signal into the PC.
The other route is to use a wireless IP camera like
http://bensbargains.net/deal/140277/
which will solve a couple issues (signal noise, multi-cameras) but will increase the power requirements on the bot. Plus you will eventually saturate the 802.11 network with a couple of these. (Note we just found the above recently and have NOT tested it with RR yet). The camera above will come about as expensive as the NTSC with Digitizer (~$25+$40) solution.
The last and final strategy is to put a PC on the bot itself. A cheap netbook will provide enough power to perform modest computation and solve the network congestion issue ... but this is obviously the most expensive solution.
STeven.
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