Ever wanted your microcontroller to sense images without eating up all your processor speed? Or wish that you had an image sensor that wasn’t limited to RGB – but could sense hue and saturation as well? Or just want a kickstarted, open source camera sensor with a cool name? Enter the Pixy CMUCam – an image sensor for your microcontroller that you can teach what to look for.
The Pixy CMUCam 5 is an image sensor with a powerful processor that you can program to only send the information you’re looking for so your microcontroller isn’t overwhelmed by data. The Pixy CMUCam also exports its information in a variety of useful ways – UART serial, SPI, I2C, digital out, or analog out – so your microcontroller can communicate easily while still doing other tasks. It’s so unobtrusive that you can even hook up multiple Pixy CMUCams to one microcontroller!
The Pixy CMUCam5 also uses hue and saturation as its primary means of image detection – rather than the normal RGB. This means that lighting or exposure won’t affect the Pixy CMUCam’s detection of an item – which is a frustrating problem with many image sensors. It’s also a vast improvement over previous versions of the Pixy CMUCam, adding increased flexibility when it comes to lighting and exposure changes.
It can also remember seven different color signatures, find hundreds of objects at the same time, and is super fast – processing at 50 frames a second. Finally, the Pixy CMUCam is also teachable so you can set it up to only send you images that you’ve specifically told it to look for. It’s easy and fast and has an open source application called PixyMon.
