Centeye notes

So vision has some options:

2 webcams, 2 isochranous competing USB streams, no control over exposure, no way to synchronize with a flashing LED, but full color 30fps 640x480. Doing this with the red/blue LED pair would work in a controlled environment, but not be a viable product. It would require a lot of wires & a USB hub.

2 board cams, daisychained wireless stream, full exposure control, at least 40fps 160x120 in greyscale.

The centeye may end up being the only useful one, because 2 can be scanned by a single chip. It does 112x112 greyscale with no onboard ADC. The wavelengths aren't given, but it probably does IR through visible.

It has a strange interface, which requires a bunch of pulses to set the row & column, then it clocks out a single row or column. There's no way to read a register. So the STM32F407 ADC goes at 1 megsample, but it would be drastically slowed by all the bit banging.

Min & max registers for the x & y, with automatic row increment would have gone a long way. Normal cameras have hardware windowing support & ADC's that run in the 40 megsample range. Microprocessors have hardware interfaces for normal cameras.

So the centeye would need an FPGA to make it look like a normal camera, before any useful speed could be had.

Trying to use a smaller window has been a house of pain. A 32x32 window can go in the hundreds of fps, maybe fast enough to track a point, but it's been done before with limited success. 60deg has been shown as the minimum viewing angle to track an object.

It also has pixel binning, which would slightly improve the framerate but not provide the required aliasing. For the right aliasing, the maximum of the pixels needs to be taken instead of the average. It may be that a high enough framerate, with a fast enough turret, can track a point with a 32x32 window.