Picam

In the BEng EE program at BCIT we have two 4-week summer terms. One of them is taken right after the first year and the second one can be taken after the completion of the second or third year. I recently completed that second 4-week term, and one of the courses I took was ELEX 4699 – Electronics System Design Project. The goal was to create a robot rover that navigates an arena, and shoots targets while minimizing completion time. The arena, functioning as a server, sends data to connected client robots. Clients use a Raspberry Pi as the host controller, and a PiCam with OpenCV for image recognition.

If you have been following my posts, you would know I am an Electrical Engineering student at BCIT. In my last post, I talked about my course ELEX 4618 (Object Oriented Program Design), and some of the weekly labs I worked on. One of those labs (#8) required us to make a colored ball sorter. It had to be programmed in C++ to run on a Raspberry Pi that uses PiCam and OpenCV to detect colors and the pigpio library to enable us to use the Pi GPIO pins to interact with other hardware. In Lab #9, we added functionality so this device can be controlled and sends a video stream over the network.