<< return to Pixycam.com

Software/hardware hack to get the position of the servos

Hello,
thanks to Bart Mertens for his program to convert SPI to PWM.
http://www.cmucam.org/boards/9/topics/3321?r=3406
I used it together with a couple of programs that I wrote myself, for a noncommercial project.
Thanks to Charmed Labs and CMU for creating the Pixy.
The main problem was to get the position of the servos. Sorry if I don’t have the time to explain it now. I didn’t use the pan/tilt demo at all, because it currently doesn’t provide that. So, as often happens, I found it easier to rewrite a pan/tilt demo from scratch. I even didn’t read their code, so mine is a little slower. It doesn’t track as fast. I think I’m going to release it open source but I’m sure that the official API for the servos will be better and faster when it’s out. Mine is just a temporary workaround. I can improve it of course, and I will.
A Beaglebone Black is needed, but that board is super easy so you won’t have any problems in porting my code to Arduino.
This is the video of my project which I made for Maker Faire Rome 2014


Sorry for some pronounciation mistakes in the video
Emiliano Daddario