Arduino Prototyping Inputs #63: Image Tracking with the PIXY! Camera

the Pixy cam has to be one of my favorite sensors for Arduino typically when we think of a little microcontroller we don't think about image recognition video processing blob detection and all those things well with a pixie cam you can't reason being there's a lot of electronics built into this little board including this camera image processors you can even hook servos up to the back of this and it can be completely on its own panning and tilting tracking an object you don't even need a microcontroller we're gonna talk about how you set this up show you some of the apps that you run on your computer to see the camera and then we'll go ahead and try hooking it up to an Arduino and see how that goes so first things first let's get this hooked up to the computer there are lots of components to the pixie camera system and when you go on to their product page you will find a program called pixie Mon and that's the first thing you want to do is download pixie Mon and get that running on your pixie camera and you just plug it into a USB port and open up pixie Mon here I've already installed it and we'll move it over here a little bit there's something to look at okay and you can see the image not super high resolution but that's okay here's where it gets really cool to use this camera you want to teach it something that's why I have a lemon and I picked this lemon because it's a different color than most of the stuff in this background although I have this little arcade cabinet it should be okay and what you do is you pull down this button till the camera light turns red and then I can hold the lemon in front of it and if you look at my screen it's saying oh I see a lot of this color is that what you want and then they click the button one more time and now if you look on my computer screen here it's tracking this lemon everywhere it goes there's a few different settings up here you can look at the raw video you can look at the cooked video and you can also just stop it so you can track multiple objects right now we're just gonna look at the lemon you can see it's even removing my finger from this but it really sees that lemon and tracks it now if I move out of the way there's some yellow in the background you can see it's starting to pick up a little bit of yellow right around here but look at the lemon how good that is now what's really cool is once you have an object like this you can do a couple of things one of them is you can directly connect the servo to servos in fact to the back of the pixie camera and it will actually pan and tilt following this object around very cool another cool thing you can do is if you learn an object like this and you're building say a robot or an art installation or something that needs color object recognition you can hook it up to your Arduino and they provide a library for that so let's take a look I'm going to go ahead and unplug my pixie and to hook it up to an Arduino they give you this great little header on the back with this cable and it plugs right into the ICSP port in the back of the Arduino that's all you have to do I get my USB cable out plug that in there we go now my pixie is hooked up to my Arduino I'm gonna quit out of the pixie Mon and I'm going to load the Arduino when you go to their website you'll also get a library of a zip file I'll walk you through quickly how you would install a zip library it's a very easy include library add the dot z IP library you can see I have it on my desktop already and I've already installed it once you install it you can go to examples scroll down and you'll find pixie and we're just going to do the hello world to begin with and this sketch is basically going to be a great place to start and it tells you through the serial console what it's seeing or its image recognition so let's go ahead and upload that and it's uploading and it's done serial port let's see 9600 let's open up the serial monitor we're at 9600 it says starting and nothing's really happening so what's gonna happen here what if I put the lemon in front of it look at that it's actually giving me a detection of where it sees something in xy-coordinate its give me that width and height of what it sees think about that in your next Arduino project full video image blob detection with an Arduino

Channel: Marc de Vinck

Views: 23,908

Keywords: IDE, arduino (computing platform), prototyping, arduino uno, electronics, raspberry pi, arduino (brand), tech explorations arduino step by step your complete guide, de vinck arduino, getting started with arduino, software, electronics (field of study), tech explorations, how-to arduino, de vinck, arduino, devinck, maker faire, microcontroller (computer processor), arduino how to, how to, tutorial, barometer, barometric, arduino tutorial, Arduino Project, video, PIXY, camera, PIXY!

Id: Y7V7uf4-v70

Length: 4min 57sec (297 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 04 2019