Advice on hardware hacking

[BlackDragon]

Hi all,

I'm looking to get into building robots and generally hacking around with hardware. I'm not really sure where to begin with this sort of thing and hope that the OCUK forum can provide some advice.

My first project will writing some software to track movement on a camera, and then move a USB missile launcher to face the target. I could try and take a USB missile launcher with built-in webcam, but I'm not sure how I would control hardware with my software. Alternatively I could try to build my own machinery, but I wouldn't know where to start.

Anyone any experience in things like this, and could offer some advice to get me started? Particularly I'm looking for advice in acquiring/building the hardware, so that I can then control it with software written on a computer. The hardware could all be connected to a laptop/desktop to do all the hard processing.

Thanks

 

[BlackDragon]

That will require a very complex algorithm, motion detection is difficult to nail down. Also keep in mind that I don't think many embedded systems have the capabilities to do this, it will need to be done through a laptop at least.
You can make some awesome awesome stuff with arduino though, many different projects out there for robots and all kind of things.

I already have experience in motion detection, as I built something a few years back using a borrowed Lego Mindstorm kit and flashed the firmware so that I could program it using Java. I guess I could buy a Lego mindstorms kit, but they aren't cheap.

It doesn't necessarily have to run completely on the system itself, I don't mind having it all connected to a desktop/laptop to do all the processing.

 

[BlackDragon]

Well then I guess it would be fine, it's not just motion detection it's motion tracking as well. So what you could do is hava java program running taking data from the webcam, then controlling a couple of servos using arduino. Should be fine.

The computer vision side I can handle, as I have quite a lot of experience with it.

That's the hardware set up I was thinking of. I was just not sure what hardware I need, and how I would communicate with the hardware. I will have a look at this Arduino stuff, I have heard of it a few times but never looked into it.

Thanks