I'm doing some shopping on sparkfun.com and I've come across a few things I want to buy to try out with Arduino. I would like some feedback from the people that worked with these components on the quality and ease of use of these products. Any suggestions are also welcome.
I also wanted to somehow add a camera to Arduino and make it take pictures and upload it through wifi. But from my googling I found that this is not possible due to processing power and ram of the Arduino. Is this true? Even the small CMOS cameras won't work? I do not want to use a wireless camera since that voids the whole learning process for me.
yeah I guess, if you are willing to give it some work Maybe you should check out the Parallax website, they have similar stuff and even a CMUcam, makes it easier. I’ve never tried anything like this, but I hope soon!
Haven’t used the others but Haven’t used the others but have used the Maxbotix sonar. Great little sensor, works great. Used both the pulse width measurement and analog voltage measurement, but not the serial. Prefer this sonar to the Deventechs (Robot-Electronics), the Parallax Ping, and others as it appears to have more consistent data output.
Basically there is no reason why you can’t interface almost anything with the Arduino, it is a neat little package.
Regarding the camera, this could be difficult or easy, depending on the camera there may be not need to buffer a complete frame, you could read a line and write it out at the same time.
See if you can find a gameboy camera, their easy to interface (cheap), have some interesting image processing built in to the Silicon (cheap), there are a few articles about driving them and did I mention they are inexpensive?
Arduino Duemilanove I have the Arduino Duemilanove. Thanks for suggesting the gameboy camera idea, I will look in to that. I have seen robots made with the accelerometer and range finder. My main concern is the Wifi module. I know it can interface with Arduino through serial communication but I am wondering how easy it is to work with the module and the quality of the Wifi signals.
Did some checking, and the ADXL322 seems to be suppoprted through an example on their tutorials page.
The WiFly module could require some tweaking in that it requires an RS232 serial interface to the micro it works with, and only the TTL serial pins are avalable on the Duemilanove (and other Arduinos too I think). It will probably require an RS232 to TTL serial converter to use on the pin 0 RX and pin 1 TX of the Arduino.
Yes I found the ADXL322 from the playground page, hence I assume it should work well with Arduino.
O I didn’t notice that they have 2 different serial protocols. If it gets too complicated or pricey then I may start looking for a different wireless solution.
The only 2 other solution I see is Bluetooth (which is expensive) and ZigBee. I’m not sure I quite understand how the Xbee module works. According to the following diagram (found from one of the links on the playground page), I would need 2 Arduino and 2 Xbee modules in order for my robot to be able to communicate wirelessly to the PC? If that’s the case then 2xArduino + 2xArduino Xbee shield + 2xXbee Module is going to be more expensive then the bluetooth. Are there any cheap wirless solutions (within $100) that I can implement the Arduino that will allow the Arduino to directly or indirectly communicate with the PC? The Wifi solution still seems to be the easiest and most direct one assuming the communication with Arduino isn’t too complicated.
Actually I found Actually I found this(WiShield 1.0) today and I was wondering whether anyone has worked with it? And also are there any other stores that sell them besides async_labs.
Maybe you should check out the Parallax website, they have similar stuff and even a CMUcam, makes it easier. I’ve never tried anything like this, but I hope soon!