I just tried the Glide “Webcam using the image component” example on my cobra board. Quite impressed on the minimal code needed to do this.
I have a couple questions concerning this example.
#1) would it be difficult to take 2 cobra boards call them Cobra A and Cobra B.
On Cobra A we have the web cam connected, and set up as a UDP server. Cobra B makes a socket connection to Cobra A and then receives the streaming video and displays it on its LCD.
#2) Would it be difficult to take this same example and add a Web server to it to display it on the PC browser ?
GHI has not made a demo of this? Seem like it would only be the next logical step.
Not to mention to have another great example of how cool the GHI products are.
This code sample takes a picture and stores it to an SD.
You can take this code, and using other code samples, do anything for want.
On the 72MHZ converting a Bitmap into a byte array takes a bit of time. While it is possible to get around five frames per seconds from the camera, and display to the screen, conversions will result in less than a frame per second rate.
I have done a program which streamed images from the camera and it was too slow so I never finished it.
I have not run tests recently, so I don’t remember exact numbers, but I think I was getting around 7 images for second for smaller images, sometimes peaking a little faster.
@ mike thanks for the link. I guess one could cobble something together. Still i am surprised that is not something that GHI would have done as a example. To open a browser and have the web cam image streamed to it would be a great example.
Not to mention that on the ChipworkX kit, that i would imagine would have some great throughput.
Jdal, leave GHI to work onthe next big hardware thing, and to make new and exciting firmware. If they wrote everything for the community, then there’d be nothing for us to do ! Don’t get me wrong, I like it when others do my homework, but I don’t learn much by doing that
Brett, their products are very powerful, no doubt there. But seriously to have a network product, web cam capable device and no example to stream it to a browser is not the best idea to me.
Besides, as much as GHI knows their boards and the .netmf they could just take one day and dedicate it to more powerful examples. in that one day they could pump out many more. As far as the learning goes, newbies like myself that are new to the VS2010, C#, .netmf & OOP this whole thing is a VERY steep hill to climb. so having many examples helps a great deal.
Once i get up to speed i plan on making all kinds of examples for the newcomers, which are well documented and explain what is going on. Far to often i see examples with no comments and does not describe anything. so for the intermediate to advanced users that may be fine, for the newbies it does not help a whole lot.
I dont want anyone to get me wrong here, I am very fond of GHI, as i am learning more and more i do not want to forget the path that got me here and how hard it was getting here. So i want to help the newbies when they first start so their climb up is not so steep.
Each day a new question is asked on the forum which would be best answered with a example. I am sure that GHI could dedicate a person full time to developing new examples.
But, GHI like any company, has limited resources and must prioritize what they are developing. Right now, GHI is hard at work at getting MF 4.2 out the door ,as well as completing the libraries for the Gadgeteer (Spider).
With the Spider they developed close to a dozen new modules. I am sure that they are quite busy developing additional modules and getting ready to ship those already announced. There is still a lot of documentation that needs to be made available for the Spider modules.
GHI does not announce new products until they are almost ready to ship. I am sure I have missed several large developments GHI is working on.
More examples will come. Some of the best have been submitted by forum members.
