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Sun, 24 Aug 2008
Upgrading an SRV-1 robot to stereo vision ...
Here is a brief description of the process to upgrade an SRV-1 Blackfin robot to stereo vision. We unsolder the motor leads and battery wire from the original motor controller or combo motor/radio board, remove the circuit boards, then check the wire lengths to make certain they will reach the connectors on the underside of the SVS controller. More often than not, we do have to lengthen those wires, especially if we are mounting a pan/tilt head to the robot base.
Note that we have added connectors to the motor and power wires, using Jameco 100766 connector pins with Jameco 100812 plastic blocks. Also, we have added somewhat taller standoffs to keep the antenna cable and 32-pin headers clear of the robot base. For the original dual-motor bases, we add 7/16" standoffs. For the new quad-motor base, we would use 1" standoffs.
The Blackfin and Matchport should be running at 2500kbps with latest firmware (srv-blackfin-081408.zip at time of this post). The final step is to move the Blackfin camera, Matchport radio, and dipole antenna cable from the original boards and base to the SVS board before mounting the SVS to the robot base. In some cases, we also have to change the lens on the original camera board from 6.5mm to the newer 3.5mm wide angle lens in order to match the second Blackfin camera.
Here is the end result of an upgrade ...
It is actually the second upgrade for this particular robot, which belongs to RoboRealm. It started life as an SRV-1 ARM7 with Zigbee a couple of years ago for use in their original SRV-1 support, and was upgraded to Blackfin with WiFi almost a year ago for development of their updated SRV-1 Blackfin support. Now it is headed back to them for development of stereo vision algorithms, and we look forward to the results !
Posted Sun, 24 Aug 2008 16:05 | HTML Link | see additional stories ...