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Onboard Video

Posted on Tuesday 30 October 2012 | No Comments

The Onboard Video system will capture a live feed from each robot and display both feeds on a screen on the off-board device. The video stream should be good enough quality to be able to facilitate both the movement of the device and determine how much to adjust the fine firing control.



Chosen Design - iWebCamera - £3.00

Provides a virtual webcam to your computer by connecting to an iPhone/Ipod touch running iWebcamera.  This will provide us with two webcam streams on the raspberry pi, one each from a iphone/ipad on each robot.

Components

- 2 compatible iPhones/ iPod touches  - Requires iOS 4.0 or later.
- The iWebCamera App - £2.99 each
- Network connection between the two iOS devices and the Raspberry Pi.


Justification

This design was chosen due to the availability of the hardware, the group already has access to two iPod touches that can be used in the project. The other solutions although possibly providing a neater more concise solution to the project, fell far outside of the project budget and so wouldn't have been possible.

Other Designs 

1. Wireless Analogue Camera - £22.98

The wireless analogue camera is a fairly good solution to our problem, it uses fairly old technology so is available surprisingly inexpensively. It still gives us the problem of having to input a analogue signal into the game controller but this can be accomplished in the same was as described before with the usb camera capture device for around £6 per video input.  We would need to ensure that the software for these would be compatible with the operating system used on the game controller. If a raspberry pi used likely to be some variation of Linux.

2. WiFi  IP webcam - £35.74

The WiFi IP camera seems to solve a lot of the problems with the previous options presented. It displays the video stream in a HTTP window on a networked device. It also offers remote pan and tilt which we could use for the firing device. And also has infrared leds built in which could possibly be focused and used within the firing system.

It is compatible with 802.11g networks which means we would need to set up a network with facilitate the connection to the game controller.   It also works with different types of security which is probably not an issue for the current use of the project however it is something that could be important if the device was used for other purposes.

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