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Configuring Pixy to track a green laser pointer.

Hi,

I’ve been trying to configure my Pixy Zumo robot to follow a green laser pointer. I can get it to work but it’s very touchy. I think there are some things I could do that would make it more reliable but I’m having trouble getting those to work also.

It seems like the automatic brightness setting is messing up the signature recognition. I downloaded and installed the “new build” so I could play with those settings. Maybe I’m not understanding how it works or maybe it’s a little buggy but I’ve been unable to do anything useful with it. If I uncheck the AEC Enable box the screen just turns black. I get a red error message in Pixymon “error: There was a problem setting a parameter”. I’m thinking it’s probably a bug. Understandable since this seems to be an untested release.

Am I just missing something here?

Has anyone experimented with tracking a laser pointer and have some suggestions for what works best?

Thanks,

A couple things… you’ll want to bias the camera brightness way down since the laser pointer is so bright. The green laser should look green (not white, or even light green!) Also, if you need to disable the AEC, which may be a reasonable way to go, you should use this release:

http://cmucam.org/attachments/1120/pixy_firmware-2.0.2.hex

it fixes an issue with the fixed AEC.

It should work really well once you dial it in. Let me know how it goes.