A recent discussion on the EEVBlog forums suggested there would be interest in the inside of my old multimeter, so I dutifully took it apart and photographed the inside.
This is the UNI TREND UT60A which I bought a couple of years ago from Maplin electronics, now I’m more knowledgeable and not a poor student I intend to replace it with something better soon.
As a first multimeter I think it’s performed well, however I’m starting to feel the need for something that responds faster and generally performs a bit better. Read more ▼
Recently I’ve been looking for new things to do with my LED Matrix shield I made for arduino and as I have some experience with writing video caputure systems I thought I’d have a go at trying to capture webcam video frames and processing them and then displaying them in real time on an 8×8 LED Matrix. Previously as part of my masters thesis I had worked with OpenCV which, amongst many other image processing and computer vision features, provides simple, cross platform video capture capability so this formed the starting point of my experiments.
In this post I will describe a method for the capture of video frames from a webcam using OpenCV, the subsequent processing required to convert to an 8×8 monochrome image and the process of sending the data via serial to arduino using libserial which is linux specific. Example source code is included at the end.
Having previously used a Logitech Quickcam Fusion with windows and OpenCV I started out on this project assuming it would work in linux, however the camera isn’t fully supported by Linux due to the specific chipset used so I replaced my webcam and found the Microsoft Lifecam Cinema Webcam to be fully linux compatible and the highest quality webcam currently available at a sensible price (currently ~£45 on Amazon) and has proved to work very well in all respects producing very high quality images (for a webcam).
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