Mindsensors NXTCamV3 Firmware: MergeBlob V0.1

After many weeks of fiddling and messing around, I’ve finally finished the first version of MergeBlob.  What is MergeBlob you ask?  It’s a modified firmware for the new Mindsensors NXTCam V3. 

I added the following features:

• Calculate the size of all the tracked objects (this is not exposed to the user, yet)
• Merge objects if they are found to be touching or overlapping
• Sort them according to size, biggest object first

This may not seem like much, but as they say, a picture speaks a thousand words, so below are some images captures using NXTCamView.

What the camera sees	These are the colours being tracked

Tracking without object merging	Tracking with object merging

So, rather than attempting to track 8 objects at once, you can now instruct your robot to just track the first object, which also happens to be the largest one and most likely the object you are after, rather than an artifact.  While the MergeBlob firmware tries hard to eliminate most sub blobs, it doesn’t always succeed. However, that being said, it does a much better job than the standard firmware.  The current version of the firmware does not allow the merging and sorting to be disabled for object tracking mode, line tracking mode is unchanged from the factory default. 

You can download the complete source here: [LINK]. You’ll need an SVN client on your computer to do so.  I can recommend using TortoiseSVN.