In the spirit of Makevember I decided that I would build one or two camera kits that I had puchased but not built. I had originally intended to enter a Smart Camera in the Vision Thing project competition using the Sipeed Maixduino board, but I ran into some implementation issues and ran out of time. I like to play with these "intelligent" camera kits and I have a few that I haven't tried. This Makevember theme seems to be a perfect opportunity to try some of them out. Since this is make anything for fun with no pressure to have anything specific accomplished, I thought I would build one or two and just make them sort of work. I decided to start with a Maix Dock which is a smaller version of the Maixduino and it uses an M1W module which has the WiFi on the module rather than using an M1 with an ESP32 like the Maixduino does. I have lots of other projects this month so I'll only do as much as free time allows......
The kit includes:
- Maix (M1W) Dock board
- 2.4" LCD Panel
- OV2640 Camera
- USB C to micro USB adapter
- WiFi antenna
- Header strips
I printed a case for it similar to the one I did for the Maixduino. It helps that the LCD and camera are the same.
I've been preparing to add a laser module to my CNC router and I've installed an IP camera in my workroom so that I can monitor activity (it has pan and tilt so I can watch my 3D printer and the CNC router and everything else). Just for fun I thought I'd include a few seconds of the case printing. It is a low resolution capture from my iPad. I'll blog more about my laser prep later.
Here are the components assembled outside of the case:
Then I went through the steps to load the firmware and software and configure the camera:
- Use the kflash_gui to flash the maixpy firmware
- Use the kflash_gui to flash the classifier model
- Use the uPyLoader to transfer and execute the python classifier script
I am using the same 20 class classifier that I used with the Maixduino to show the functionality of the camera.
Here is a short video of the camera classifying images on the computer monitor:
That's all I'm doing for this particular kit. Sorry for the poor video quality but in the spirit of Makevember I'm not going to spend extra time trying to clean it up.
Top Comments