Among the (many) things I’m playing with, I managed to finally get some pix from an old CMUcam2 look-alike I’d bought some time back.

The device was relatively cheap — around 150 usd from INEX Global  in Thailand — and has some well-publicised abilities, incl blob following and colour stats gathering.

It was intended as an "aiming camera" for a more professional model, so getting an actual image out of it wasn’t the real important thing. It was supposed to simply follow the blob at the centre of the f-of-v, taking the big camera along for the ride on a pan head.

I’ve prev showed the simple "out of the box" blob following ability, incl the ability for the cam to drive a single servo in the direction of the blob-to-be-followed.

But after reading through the INEX leaflet, I discovered this somewhat-hacked version of the CMU cam could be controlled by the java CMUcam2GUI.

It look a while to get the java SDK up (prev had little use for it on my linux boxes) and connect the cam to an embedded wifi board. But after a couple of days it managed to send back a few poor and low-res pix at 100 kb — about as fast as the camera can appartently drive the 25 Mb link.

Pix of living and dining areas below.

By default the cam comes up with gain on auto but no white balance. Even waiting a few seconds between pix didn’t seem to help it settle down any — the CMU docs say the gain takes around 5 sec to initialise.

Eventually the cam should be able to send continuous pix at double the res than those attached. But even those attached took a couple of seconds each to load down to the linux machine.