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Tracking Laser with Pixy

Pixy Software
#1

Hello!
We would like to use the Pixy2 Camera to track a laser as it moves around a wall. This wall will be about 15ft away from the PixyCamera. We would like to have the laser attached to the Pixy camera, so that when it detects an object hitting the laser, it will move the laser.

However, we are running into a few problems.

  1. We can’t get the Pixy camera to track the laser. We have tried turning the camera brightness way down, but the laser is still showing white. We have tried doing this multiple times, changing little things each time, and are running into a lot of problems. We are currently using a 532 nm green laser, but can change lasers if needed (would prefer to stick to green laser).

  2. How can we get the pixy camera to move when it tracks an object hitting the laser? We saw the video posted by Pixy on youtube, but can’t find the exact resources to help us. Here’s a link to the video we used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-JBesTWeJg

Thanks in advance!
Elena & Hannelore

#2

Hello,
Turning the brightness down is usually key to getting Pixy to track the laser. You may need to reduce the brightness such that nothing else is exposed.

Could you send some screen grabs of what Pixy sees?

Edward

#3

Hello,
We turned the brightness down, and it seemed to track the white part of the laser, but not the actual color. We know that Pixy can’t track white, so we are a little confused what color code it was grabbing. The laser we have is very bright, since it is 532 nm. It flickers in the video, and we were wondering if this might be why it’s not tracking very well. Here are some screenshots we took. (Look for another post with more photos. Because we are a “new user” we can’t post more than 2 images in a post.)

Screen Shot 2021-08-12 at 10.01.25 AM
Screen Shot 2021-08-12 at 10.01.25 AM866×554 136 KB
Screen Shot 2021-08-12 at 10.01.33 AM
Screen Shot 2021-08-12 at 10.01.33 AM1180×910 70.7 KB

Thanks!
Elena & Hanne

#4

Here are more photos.

Screen Shot 2021-08-12 at 10.05.02 AM
Screen Shot 2021-08-12 at 10.05.02 AM842×544 22.6 KB
Screen Shot 2021-08-12 at 10.09.07 AM
Screen Shot 2021-08-12 at 10.09.07 AM1240×710 393 KB

#5

Hello,
Laser light is quite bright and will easily overexpose the sensor, which is fine, but it will register as white.
You will probably need to turn the brightness even lower such that the other parts of the image are very underexposed (dark).

Hope this helps.

Edward

#7

Hello,
Thank you so much for your help. We ended up playing around with all of the “Pixy Parameters” and were able to adjust a ton of different parameters to get it to track the laser.

Thank you so much for your help!

1 Like
#8

Great news – glad you got it working :slight_smile: