10-28-2011 02:49 PM
Hi there, I'm a student starting a project for a class I am taking in LabView. I have an idea of the project I want to do but I still need to gather hardware for this project so I thought it might be worthwhile to poll the community as to what might work and what might not. Right now, my project is going to be a USB missile launcher (or similar projectile firing mechanism I can wire relatively painlessly into LabView) as an artillery piece. My first step is to see if anybody has worked with these kinds of toys and has any idea how usable they are with labview. My second step is to have the artillery auto-acquire a pre-made target, perhaps a bulls-eye or perhaps a physical object. If the object is out of range, I would like LabView to recognize this and say so. As to this end, I thought about using a web camera and analyzing the size of the object in the camera's image versus the actual known size of the object to determine how far it is. From what I can tell, the tool for this might be pattern matching? I would simply like to know if these two concepts are plausible and, if so, is there perhaps a better way to go about the idea of this lab? I suppose it might be helpful to say that on a scale of 1-10 I would be about a 5 or 6 as to my knowledge of labview (I have experience with interfacing GPIB and USB but not terribly extensive). Any and all suggestions would be much appreciated! Thank you in advance.
-Kevin
10-31-2011 05:40 PM
Hi Kevin,
I can't speak to the hardware side of this, as unfortunately I don't have one of those cool USB missile launchers... although after watching a couple youtube videos about them, I feel like I need one. However, being able to tell the distance an object is from a camera using LabVIEW should not be too difficult to implement. Using Vision Assistant you could setup a scaling function such that you would input a reference size of your target object and then compare that with the size of the target in the newly acquired image. That should be able to give you a decent scale value for how far away the target is from your camera, but you would probably need to setup a case structure or something similar in order to know the true physical distance.
10-31-2011 06:03 PM
Thank you for your reply. In the time since I posted this I had done some (minimal) research into this camera technique and it seemed plausible enough but it's good to have the reassurance of a recommendation. As for the USB missile launcher, I found a video of one being controlled by labview (which I assumed was possible anyway) but right now I'm just trying to find out if these things have any kind of accuracy or consistency at all. And yes, that was kind of the ulterior motive to this project. Yes it's 40% of my grade but that's also 40% of my grade where I get to "accidentally" shoot missiles at my friends!