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Can I use the Pixy (latest one) on Raspberry Pi / Mac / Arduino Uno?

Pixy Software
#1

Hello all,

Very excited to be part of this, I am going to most likely purchase the pixy, it is sitting in my cart on amazon as we speak…

I am wondering a couple things:

  1. Will I be able to use this with my Raspberry Pi, Mac, and Arduino Uno?
  2. What CANT I use the Pixy Cam5 with?
  3. I am very interested to do my own vision algorithms. Will I have raw access to the data from Pixy, that I can then dev on?

I think that is all for now… thanks in advance!

#2

Hi Kal,

Glad you’re excited about Pixy!

  1. The Raspberry Pi is not currently supported, although we are working on it. I’m sorry, but I can’t give you a timeframe for when support will be ready. Mac and the Arduino Uno are supported.
  2. I can tell you that Arduino, Windows, Mac, and Linux are all currently supported. Anything outside of that may not be officially supported yet. We’re currently working on ports for Beaglebone/Beagleboard and Raspberry Pi.
  3. With the current library, we don’t have a way to stream the raw pixel data to the Arduino or a PC-based program outside of Pixymon. This has been requested quite a bit, so we’ll likely add this support. There is a bit of support for “exporting to Matlab”:https://github.com/charmedlabs/pixy/search?q=matlab&ref=cmdform, however.

Hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Scott

#3

Thank you Scott!

I have some follow ups if you do not mind:

  1. I understand that Pixy is both open software and open hardware? Can you explain some more about the open hardware aspect? (I am new to hardware space). So… how does that work… the specs are released and anyone can make the hardware? Doesnt one have to have access to PCB machines, etc, in order to do your hardware though?

  2. Regarding the pixel export functionality - that is a great idea. Am I to understand that with the export to MATLAB, I can get the raw RGB pixels? (So if I have MATLAB on Mac/Win/Linux then I can get raw pixels?)

  3. Regarding the pixel export functionality for general platforms - what is your (really really) rough timeline for this type of support?

Thanks for the quick response time, and thanks again in advance. This is a very cool product, so I want to understand it from all angles so that I can purchase and start deving! :slight_smile:

Regards;

#4

Hi Kal,

  1. Being an open hardware project means we “distribute”:http://cmucam.org/projects/cmucam5/documents all of the design files and parts list for the PCB. So you can use these files to make changes to the board design, or even build it yourself. You don’t necessarily need a PCB machine, you can just send the design files to a PCB company and they’ll do it for you.

  2. We’ve really only been using this feature for debugging, but that’s not to say you can’t use it yourself. Currently it outputs the “u” and “v” values (where @u=(r-b)/2@ and @v=(b-g)/2@) from our color algorithm. If you look at the “pixelsOut”:https://github.com/charmedlabs/pixy/blob/6ee0067c50401650adb52c5a0e583a3e27aac696/host/pixymon/renderer.cpp method, you can easily modify this to output the raw pixel data.

  3. I’m afraid to post any dates since we haven’t really planned out the feature or started coding it. I’d guess that it could still be a few months away with all of the other higher priority items on our to-do list.

Glad I could help. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Scott

#5

Kal,

Support for the Raspberry Pi is now available. Please try this procedure:

http://cmucam.org/projects/cmucam5/wiki/Hooking_up_Pixy_to_a_Raspberry_Pi

Thanks,
John