Picking up where we left off...

When you last left your intrepid hero, things were looking up. The system was back up and functional. Das blinkinlights were doing their thing. Life seemed grand.

And then reality.

I hooked everything up, plugged it all in, and remounted the targeting laser. In a fit of brilliant insanity, I then fired up the control program and told the kids to build some lego towers to shoot down.

They oblidged.

And all heck broke loose.

You see...when I hot-glued the targeting laser to the lego beam, it was kinda-sorta fudged on. "Gee, that looks pretty straight" sorta thing.

Well, it wasn't. From 24" away, the interceptor was landing missles at least 2-3" off where the laser was pointing. Not good when the kids are so proud of themselves for actually getting the laser on the target and then the arrow has the GALL to land somewhere off yonder.

I gave everybody and extra turn, and promised to "fix the robot".

Then I scratched my head. However am I going to "calibrate" this laser?!! It's hotglued on fer pete's sake. Long story short, I tried a bunch of lego jigs, but nothing worked quite right. So I resigned myself to removing and re-gluing.

Of course, this necessitated some sort of aligning jig. In a fit of inspiration (I have them often. Fits, that is. Inspiration more occasionally.) I envisioned some sort of calibration jig.

Mounted the laser. Shined it on the brick. Hotglued everything in place.

Ok, that's on the mechanical side. What about on the software side?

I've been ruminating on how to keep a solid lock on the laser from the camera. Camera noise (spurious RGB values from the cheap webcam) have been somewhat of a problem. As well, the inherent nature of 160x120 video (never did solve that) has been an issue.

So I did what any self-respecting engineer would do. I upped the minimum hardware requirements. ;^)

I have an older DV camcorder that will only function as a camera, now. So I bought an inexpensive 1394 PC card from newegg, paired it up with the sony dv camcorder, and now I get BEAUTIFUL CLEAR pictures! Better optics, less noise, AND I can turn off the auto-exposure/brightness in cam. Sweet.

Of course, that's all fine and good...but we still have the "oblique laser" problem.

If the target surface is at a nice 90 degrees to the laser, we get the standard bright red dot.

HOWEVER...if the target is at an oblique angle...



The laser's beam is spread out in a "puddle", and it's overall less noticeable, and likely not the brightest spot.



I had an epiphany today. (I promise, the point is coming soon!)

I happened across "how stuff works" page on the apache helicopter's hellfire missiles. (mmm...missiles) And I was inspired by the targeting method. Apparently, the older hellfires were laser targeted where the missile would seek to whatever target was being painted by the laser. But not just any laser...

A laser that pulsed to a pre-determined code. (that was downloaded to the missile prior to launch)

"Ah-HA!" I thought. If I can somehow parse out the laser (maybe it's got unique HSV values?!!) and match what I think the target point is against some sort of pulse pattern...hmm...

Thinking...thinking...