Fanjita's Rants (Entries tagged as webcam)

The Raspberry Rover

nospam@example.com (Fanjita) — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 23:50:10 +0100

Here's a little video of my work-in-progress robot rover. It uses a Raspberry Pi, running OpenCV with a webcam, to see and react to its environment.

The current program is just a proof-of-concept prototype - it looks in the field of view for any strongly green objects. If it can see one, it turns to face it, then advances until it is close. If it can't see any, then it turns on the spot until it can.

The current platform was built very cheaply - parts from a 3 in 1 All Terrain Robot from I Want One Of Those, a Slice of Pi prototyping board from Ciseco, a cheap Hue HD webcam, plus a 2-channel H-Bridge motor control IC from Hobbytronics, and of course the Raspberry Pi. Total cost is probably about £60.
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Initial Raspberry Pi adventures : Setting up a webcam

nospam@example.com (Fanjita) — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 22:32:59 +0100

I recently got my Raspberry Pi, and although I haven't had a lot of time to play with it, I've been able to do a little bit of mucking around.

I initially started with the Debian OS distribution, since I already run several Debian servers (such as this one) and it, or Ubuntu, are usually my distro of choice. But the experience with Debian on the Pi seems pretty flaky - no sshd by default (which matters to me since I only plan to run my Pi without a screen), and lots of people seem to have trouble getting hardware up and running (especially webcams), so in this case I fairly quickly moved over to Arch Linux - if only for the experience of playing around with another distro.
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