Creating a Hacked Webcam for an iRobot Roomba Project

[cmcclellan]

Hi everyone, I'm about to start a MCU project that involves using a already hacked iRobot Roomba and taking video input. However, I'm trying to figure out how I would read the data from a webcam. I was thinking about hacking an old webcam so that it could give me an RGB output, but that would involve either using a usb connection, for which I don't know the commands, or creating an entirely new parallel connection which is in itself a project. Any suggestions? By the way memory and speed are not an issue as I'll be using the TI lms1968 which has a clock speed of 50Mhz and 265k of memory.

 

[schip666!]

The typical webcam with USB acts as a slave device and needs to be connected to a "host" USB device. It turns out that hosting USB is way harder than slaving, so it needs more processing power. I don't know if your chosen controller has the features or power to do it. You might be able to hack into the camera and find a usable signal before the USB. Or just give in and use a controller board that supports USB hosting, maybe an old laptop...

You can also reconsider what you need the video image for...if it's navigating around the floor maybe just a 2-d line of sensors is all you need.