PICaxe Controlled Video....

[slurp]

I stumbled upon this the other day, while initially developed for R/C Model Aircraft this small video camera could make for an interesting PICaxe add-on.

http://www.flycamone2.com/index.php?id=20&L=3

This devices is charged by USB, records with a number of modes for still and video to SD-Cards. A servo horn attachment is available, allowing some control of the lens direction and as well as a set of contacts for shutter control or start/stop of video recording.

It weighs just 37g and is 40 x 80 x 14 mm... I was considering it for recording a MiniSumo view of a contest but I'm sure you can think of lots of other applications.

Cost appears to be in the region of £45-50 just a bit more than I'd like to pay at the moment...

regards,
Colin

 

[Dippy]

That looks excellent.

Questions:
1. How is it a PICAXE add-on?
2. How much do you expect to pay for something like that? (I mean, do you REALLY think £45 is expensive?)

 

[marcos.placona]

I might be wrong, but a evice like that could cost a lot more, so I think 45 quid is quite good.

Also, I can't really see how this is gonna be a picaxe addon, as it's already an external device, and does all the job by itself. You could control things like "start recording / top recording", but it wouldn't go much beyond this line, and there'd be no reason for that anyway.

 

[slurp]

May be I should have said add-on device... yes it's external and self contained. With the various picture and video mode I would consider recording triggered by other sensors or devices attached to the picaxe.

In terms of the price, yes it's good... it's just too much for me to justify spending the money at the moment.

regards,
Colin

 

[moxhamj]

It is certainly lighter and smaller than other cameras. But most digital cameras and many mobile phones can record video, and they put it on a SD card. Picaxe can turn things on and off but I'm not sure if picaxe could do much else...

Unless - something that would be hugely useful. I picaxe SD card reader. But there are threads around from last year and I think people tried really hard and came up against various problems. Was it Hippy that got the furthest?

Even if a picaxe could read out the video info, I'm not sure how useful that would be.

I guess what you could build is a picaxe chip that listens to a spare servo channel on a RC plane, and turns on the video when a servo setting is changed. Though with the huge capacity of modern SD cards, you may as well just set it running at the beginning of the flight.

 

[andrew_qld]

I bought a USB memory stick with a camera from the Jaycar chuck-out bin in Townsville a while ago and was going to use a surface mount 08M to make a "cat cam". The idea was to attach the thing to our defenceless moggy and use the picaxe to trigger a picture every 1 minute (or whatever). Then we have a record of where the cats been.

I saw got the idea from http://www.mr-lee-catcam.de/cc_index_en.htm

Unfortunately I never finished the project as I moved interstate, but I might start on it again soon.

The same idea could be used for model areoplanes.

 

[demonicpicaxeguy]

Dr Acula , i don't know how far hippy got with the sd cards, but i did however get to the point of reading and writing single sectors at a time without problem, however multiple sector writes we're an issue involving lost clock cycles, a problem that was repeatable across a wide range of cards, but somthing not documented in the specification, Hippy does have some very well written mmc code that works well and wouldn't be too hard to modify for sd card use, the biggest thing i found with the sd cards and mmc cards is the wire distance between the card and the chip, the shorter it is the more reliable the card is
powersupply was another interesting point it was important to note that my mobile phone 2 feet away caused enough interference to keep me stumped for hours (until i picked it up on the scope)