Simon Joseph Aquilina

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11 years, 2 months ago.

Is mbed right for me?

Hello,

I want to develop a car that can be controlled over a Wi-Fi and has a video camera to see where this is going. I tried to do this with Arduino but I was told that video processing is impossible with Arduino. I know that I could have just used an IP Camera, but I want to try and achieve this on a single board.

I was wondering if mbed might be the right tool for me?

4 Answers

Martin Smith
11 years, 2 months ago.

I have done some image processing on the mbed so it is possible. However (and I do hope this is a RC car!) the bigger the resolution of the image the longer this processing takes and the more memory it needs. I worked with 160*120 pixel images and was getting around 10 frames / sec picking out edges and converting colour space info.

I suspect you will need something more powerful than the mbed?

Thank you for your answer. I do not know what you mean by RC; I want it to be remote controlled by over a Wi-Fi connection. I saw there are three versions of mbed hardware. None of them are powerful enough?

posted by Simon Joseph Aquilina 01 Mar 2013

By RC I mean Radio Control (i.e. a toy car). I agree with Chris below, the Raspberry Pi would be better at this kind of thing. I think it is powerful enough to run OpenCV which would make the computer vision stuff easier.

posted by Martin Smith 02 Mar 2013
Simon Joseph Aquilina
poster
11 years, 2 months ago.

Ok, so at the moment there are three boards; none of them is powerful enough? I saw that mbed allows you to finally create a final board; couldn't that final board allow you to have an ARM processor more powerful?

Sorry do not know exactly how this works!

Chris Pepper
11 years, 2 months ago.

Hey, You may be able to get very low resolution video stream over wifi, but this hardware is not designed for that type of application, The Raspberry Pi, a full system on a board, probably has the speed and memory you require, It doesn't have as much low level connectivity though, the gpio pins are explained here

I think the better solution (unless you want to use the camera for on board processing, computer vision), would be a separate video transmitter and camera, using the mbed for control.

Tharshan M
11 years, 1 month ago.

A good solution might be to to use the mbed for the controlling of the RC car, and then maybe use an android phone for example to stream the camera data over wifi to your laptop, where the phone maybe mounted on the car. The laptop/desktop would do the gruntwork of the image processing much faster and then what ever results you get from your image processing you can use to drive the car using the mbed. This is a workable solution and have been done with things like the arduino, so no reason why it cant be done on mbed!