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From: dpalmer@csuohio.edu (Darryl Palmer)
Subject: Re: Inexpensive B&W camera + framegrabber sources?
Message-ID: <1994Jul22.130631.29162@news.csuohio.edu>
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Date: Fri, 22 Jul 1994 13:06:31 GMT
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Patrick C Leger (pl1u+@andrew.cmu.edu) wrote:
: I'm looking for inexpensive black and white (or color) video cameras
: for image acquisition on a PC.  Resolution of 512x512 or better is
: needed, and I need some way to get the images into the PC (either by a
: framegrabber board or through a serial interface).  Does anyone know
: of any suppliers of such stuff?  The images don't have to be real
: high-quality; I'm going to do some feature recognition on them with
: neural nets.

: Chris


: --
: Chris Leger (blah@cmu.edu)
: Carnegie Mellon University
: Field Robotics Center

At 512 by 512 resolution, that eliminates many CCD cameras so I would
look at just finding a camcorder (Or get on from school).  As far as pricing
on Framegrabbers you could get on from Cortex, I bought the Cortex I board
for about $400, or you can build your own.  I built a 256x256 mono digitizer
based on the ImageWise from Byte magazine.  It used a PIC 16C57 as the
processor and performed a modified Sobel edge detection algorithm and sent
the resulting image over 9600 baud RS232.  I think the total cost is under
$100 for total construction.  The Cortex I uses the VGA memory address for
the stored image in memory, so you have to disable the VGA memory to access
the digitized picture and then re-enable the VGA memory to write stuff to the
screen.


Darryl Palmer
