KS: color tracking camera

[mhectorgato]

Why Is A Cheap Color Sensor Such A Big Deal?

With 12 days left, Pixy is more than $125,000 past its original $25,000 Kickstarter goal and its promise has to do with its focus on colors. You can easily program Pixy to detect specific hues by holding objects in front of it, and every time it “sees” an object of this color move past it can follow it and/or capture specific data. Using color as a shorthand allows Pixy to output a more reasonable quantity of data for processing (it can track up to seven colors at once). It’s also totally open source and customizable so users can modify its algorithms or write new ones for their exact needs.

The device can output to UART serial, SPI, I2C, digital out, or analog out, a PC/Mac app called PixyMon shows what the sensor is seeing when plugged in, and of course Pixy can be hooked to a microcontroller like an Arduino for use in other projects. In the early days of the Kickstarter you could get a Pixy for $40, but now there aren’t many options left. If they put their money where their color-sensor is, though, it seems like we’ll be inundated with Pixys soon.

[HughB]

Looks like a pretty cool camera. I hope the release price isnt too much more than the kickstarter prices

[mhectorgato]

@HughB

Looks like a pretty cool camera. I hope the release price isnt too much more than the kickstarter prices

I’d guess they would be near the $100 when going to retail.

What I hope gets improved in future revs is that you have show it the color first. I would think having certain colors pre-programmed would make it more useful.

[Duke_Nukem]

I like as I’ve been thinking about some motion detection lately and this might be a nice alternative, hope someone builds a Gadgeteer version.

[HughB]

Making a gadgeteer mounting module would be really easy for this. All you would need would be the opposite gender of the rear connector and some mount supports on a board with a gadgeteer socket on the back.

I may have a look at making one…

[njbuch]

Since I backed this project, I have to buy this module Hugh! Count me in.