Cool Kickstarter: RoboSnap

RoboSnap is a a very compact vision system for the RPi and EV3.  It is based on the very popular PixyCam (CMUCam5) but in a much more compact package. Capable of much more than simply recognising colours, RoboSnap can also detect simple shapes like triangles, rectangles, circles.  It can return provide size, location and colour for these objects, as well as give you an actual full image of what it is currently seeing.  That would allow you to do your own post-processing on the RPi or EV3.  How cool is that?

While functionally very similar to the PixyCam, it has dispensed with all of the interfaces other than USB, which allows it to be made much, much smaller.  The USB interface is by far the best one in any case, seeing as it’s a lot faster than UART, SPI or I2C.

On the EV3, you can use the RoboSnap with Snap!, a graphical programming environment.  On the RPi, using the Dexter Industries BrickPi, you can use either Snap! or Scratch.  The blocks look simple enough:

Shari, the force behind RoboSnap, has created some cool videos to demonstrate the vision system with an EV3.  It’s nice to finally have a cool external sensor for the EV3 that uses the brick’s USB host port!  Maybe someone can modify the LEGO firmware to make it work with the standard programming environment, that would be sweet!

There are quite a number of rewards to choose from for backing this project, so be sure to check out the Kickstarter page!