Let's imagine that we have any of popular photocameras (like Canon or whatever) installed on a mechanical platform. This platform allows us to accurately adjust camera's lens direction to any interesting object. This platform is controlled from PC via microcontroller board. But we need a feedback from a photocamera - the image which currently appears on camera's display. Obviously, this feedback is required to be sure that the camera looks in a right direction. At the moment I don't know how to get a single shot image from photocamera by a microcontroller.
Could you please recommend me any directions to dig to ? Any recommendations on how to select photo camera (web cameras are not allowed) ? Any tips ?
Thank you in advance =)
Dwelch is right, you need to pick a "friendly" camera and work from there - google CHDK for a starter.
You could use the SPI interface of a micro to spoof being an SD card, and accept image data from the camera straight into the micro, but you would probably need quite a fast micro with a fair amount of RAM, especially if you want to do any processing on it.
Other than that, you could sample the camera's AV-output (if it has one), either into the micro or straight into the PC via a USB capture stick (or USB capture stick into micro if you're being a show-off), or maybe interrogate the camera over its USB or (insert name of proprietary port here) IO port.
Getting more hacky (yes, even more!) you could sniff the LCD data bus of the camera and steal the image from that, but that brings all sorts of pain, and tiny, tiny screws.
Related
I'm trying to interface a board level USB camera with a STM32 family microcontroller and send the image file to a central computer using CANbus. Just want to know if this is possible/ has been done before and how involved a task it would be.
I worked at a company where we sent live (low-resolution infra-red) video streams over CAN, but towards the end of my time there they shifted towards ethernet.
So it is possible, but certainly not what it is best suited for. The main advantages of CAN are that it is a multi-point, multi-master bus with built in arbitration. It is meant for short packets, typically 8 bytes (CAN FD allows you to increase that).
If your camera is USB, why not just get a USB repeater cable or USB-over-ethernet gateway?
If there is already a CAN network in place that you are piggy-backing onto then you need to consider what impact you will have on the existing traffic.
If you are starting from scratch then of course CAN will work but it would be an odd choice.
Depending on if its CAN or CANFD (Affects the maximum bulk transfer packet size) you have higher level protocol options to packetise your images and send them over canbus like any other block of data.
For just reguarlar CAN your after part of the standard called J1939.21 Data Link Layer, there are public versions of this floating around online, however due to the agreement when purchasing the standard, I am not able to share the specifics from what I have.
Its on pages 27-28 of the 2001 revision.
Being a novice I need an advice how to solve the following problem.
Say, with photogrammetry I have obtained a point cloud of the part of my room. Then I upload this point cloud to an android phone and I want it to track its camera pose relatively to this point cloud in real time.
As far as I know there can be problems with different cameras' (simple camera or another phone camera VS my phone camera) intrinsics that can affect the presision of localisation, right?
Actually, it's supposed to be an AR-app, so I've tried existing SDKs - vuforia, wikitude, placenote (haven't tried arcore yet cause my device highly likely won't support it). The problem is they all use their own clouds for their services and I don't want to depend on them. Ideally, it's my own PC where I perform 3d reconstruction and from where my phone downloads a point cloud.
Do I need a SLAM (with IMU fusion) or VIO on my phone, don't I? Are there any ready-to-go implementations within libs like ARtoolKit or, maybe, PCL? Will any existing SLAM catch up a map, reconstructed with other algorithms or should I use one and only SLAM for both mapping and localization?
So, the main question is how to do everything arcore and vuforia does without using third party servers. (I suspect the answer is to device the same underlay which vuforia and other SDKs use to employ all available hardware..)
I just bought a Sony A7 and I am blown away with the incredible pictures it takes, but now I would like to interact and automate the use of this camera using the Sony Remote Camera API. I consider myself a maker and would like to do some fun stuff: add a laser trigger with Arduino, do some computer controlled light painting, and some long-term (on the order of weeks) time-lapse photography. One reason I purchased this Sony camera over other models from famous brands such as Canon, Nikon, or Samsung is because of the ingenious Sony Remote Camera API. However, after reading through the API reference it seems that many of the features cannot be accessed. Is this true? Does anyone know a work around?
Specifically, I am interested in changing a lot of the manual settings that you can change through the menu system on the camera such as ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. I am also interested in taking HDR images in a time-lapse manner and it would be nice to change this setting through the API as well. If anyone knows, why wasn't the API opened up to the whole menu system in the first place?
Finally, if any employee of Sony is reading this I would like to make this plea: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE keep supporting the Remote Camera API and improve upon an already amazing idea! I think the more control you offer to makers and developers the more popular your cameras will become. I think you could create a cult following if you can manage to capture the imagination of makers across the world and get just one cool project to go viral on the internet. Using http and POST commands is super awesome, because it is OS agnostic and makes communication a breeze. Did I mention that is awesome?! Sony's cameras will nicely integrate themselves into the internet of things.
I think the Remote Camera API strategy is better than the strategies of Sony's competitors. Nikon and Canon have nothing comparable. The closest thing is Samsung gluing Android onto the Galaxy NX, but that is a completely unnecessary cost since most people already own a smart phone; all that needs to exist is a link that allows the camera to talk to the phone, like the Sony API. Sony gets it. Please don't abandon this direction you are taking or the Remote Camera API, because I love where it is heading.
Thanks!
New API features for the Lens Style Cameras DSC-QX100 and DSC-QX10 will be expanded during the spring of 2014. The shutter speed functionality, white balance, ISO settings and more will be included! Check out the official announcement here: https://developer.sony.com/2014/02/24/new-cameras-now-support-camera-remote-api-beta-new-api-features-coming-this-spring-to-selected-cameras/
Thanks a lot for your valuable feedback. Great to hear, that the APIs are used and we are looking forward nice implementations!
Peter
I need to read GPS coordinates using a VB.NET program directly from a GPS device connected to the computer via USB (bluetooth also OK but prefer USB). My constraints are:
The computer running the software is NOT connected to the internet. It is a stand-alone machine in a moving vehicle.
I need to be able to read GPS coordinates from the device while the vehicle moves and use the device to perform location-aware queries on a local database
The GPS device can be anything (e.g. Garmin GPS or GPS card without display), as long at it can be purchased off the shelf or over the internet.
The user group for this solution is quite small (about 40 users).
I have already checked out GPSGate (http://gpsgate.com/) and emailed my requirements to them. They replied, and I quote: "I am sorry but we have no product for you." (end of reply).
I also checked out Eye4Software) and tried using their demo product but it does not pick up my Garmin Nuvi via USB. They responded to my questions but unfortunately their OEM product is an ActiveX dll and I am looking for a .NET based solution.
So if anyone has a "home-grown" solution based on the .NET framework, that can be easily duplicated, I would really appreciate it. Many thanks!
Most of the USB GPS pucks will speak a standardized protocol called NMEA 0183. There are several .net protocols out there that decode this protocol, see here for some pointers to get started.
So, if when shopping around you just check that the device is able to generate NMEA you should be up and running in a minimum of time, and at a reasonable cost.
EDIT: a "gps puck" is a GPS receiver shaped more or less like a hockey puck, like this one
For in-car use there are specific versions that can be fixed onto the vehicle's roof
They are pretty common (many online shops carry them) but select them based on the chip that's inside, the popular Sirf Star 3 is still a solid performer, stable and accurate. I haven't had the chance to play with its successor, the Sirf Star 4 yet, and I'm not implying these are the only good chips around, only that I got most experience with this chip.
I got a question of image capture with a PC camera(integrated note book camera or web cam). While I am developing a computer vision system in which high quality image capture is the key issue, most of the current method is use VFW or directShow to capture video stream and snap one frame as an image.
However, this method could not get high quality image ( or using up the full capacity of the camera). For example, I got a 5 mega pixel web cam. but the video stream is maximum 720P(USB bandwidth problem?). Video streaming is wasting some of the camera sensors.
Could I video streaming and taking picture independently? like inputing video with a 640*480 video stream and render on the stream. then take a picture of 1280*720 from the same cam? I guess this would be a hardware problem? the new HTC one X camera?
In short, it's there a way for a PC system to take a picture ,full use of the sensor capacity, without video streaming and capture one frame. Is this a hardware related problem? Does common web cam support this? Or a Software problem, I should learn DirectShow things?
Thanks a lot.
I vaguely remember (some) video sources offer both a capture and still pin, the latter I assume would offer you higher quality. You can easily test this in GraphEdit. If it works then yes, you'll have to learn DirectShow. Or pay someone to code this for you.