Is the USB connector compatible with hosting a stock webcam? How much new driver code would be required to interface a camera to the 'Net?
My previous Zedboard FPGA prototype used SPI to interrogate the sensor directly but I don’t see an equivalent interface.
Unfortunately, the camera is an integral part of the circuit as opposed to typical entertainment/babycam monitoring. But obviously, I can just mount a stock webcam to the same frame and mange both addresses. So I’m definitely proceeding with the SmoothieBoard based design …
But this is the only thing that it doesn’t already seem to do, and long term I’d like to integrate them.
Would the community be interested in including this feature in the released source, or am I tilting at windmills?
Imported from wikidot
Hey. This is one or two orders of magnitude out of reach of Smoothie in terms of RAM and processing power. A FPGA would have no problem but that’s not what we have on board.
You probably want to use a Raspberry Pi or something similar for your webcam, and Smoothie for motion control.
The processing is a bit too much for an FPGA too but I was able to get a proof of concept up and running.
But as I said in the Summary, the heavy lifting will be done by a distributed process in the “cloud” and the SB need only concern itself with implementing the physical motions from a dynamic Ethernet Gcode stream.
I previously had this implemented on Android cel phones but it was tediously slow.
Since the physical process of the motion will be many orders of magnitude slower than simply drawing the path in pixels, there is plenty of spare power offboard to proceed at the required glacial pace. It does not need to direct the head in real time. It is roughly analogous to snapping an image and reevaluating it between FDM layers.
If anyone is interested, I can send a link to a demo of an early implementation of the process but at the moment my “karma” is insufficient to let me post it XD
Now I’m finally ready to do the same process with physical media. Using a SmoothieBoard to run the XY gantry will allow me to concentrate on the less well determined aspects of the project.
I’d just like to know if anyone else is working on passing through a webcam but there’s no strict requirement that they be integrated.
It’s just that passing the image off to the Ethernet is the only thing needed that the SB doesn’t already do. And it really is a common feature for 3D printing since they are apt to fail in spectacular fashion with no warning …