Date: 10/28/09

Student Name: Hao (Hardy) He

TAs: Mike Pridgen

Thomas Vermeer

Instructors: Dr. A. Antonio Arroyo

Dr. Eric M. Schwartz

University of Florida

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

EEL 5666

Intelligent Machines Design Laboratory

Weekly Report 9

I bought a USB-to-Serial connector so that the CMU camera can be connected to my laptop. My laptop communicated with the camera well using Microsoft HyperTerminal. For example, if I typed "GV\r" in the command window, HyperTerminal would get the version number "CMUcam2 v1.0 c6". If I typed "TW\r", the camera would track the color (e.g. from a red ball) found in the central front region and HyperTerminal would receive a T-packet repeatedly. For example, the HyperTerminal showed:

:TW
ACK
T 30 55 12 33 40 80 35 70

The first two numbers after "T" are the middle of mass x value and y value, respectively. These two values would change if I was moving the red ball in front of the camera.

The camera can be configured to run in the demo mode. In this mode, it can automatically drive two servos (pan and tilt) to track a colored object. Right now it worked well if only one servo was connected to the camera board. The camera board failed to initiate if two servos were connected. I will figure it out later.

I scanned over the USART library that the TA and other classmates provided. I wrote some code and now the PV board can read the string "CMUcam2 v1.0 c6" from the camera when the camera was just turned on. However, after this step the camera did not respond to any strings sent from the PV board. It will take more time to clearly understand how USART works.