Camera tracking with Pixy and Dynamixel Servos

August 25, 2014

I hooked up my Pixy Cam to an Arbotix running two dynamixel servos in a pan/tilt configuration.

They Dynamixels are very advanced actuators with dedicated onboard MCUs for adjustable torque, speed, and response. They also have position, load, voltage, and temperature feedback. The Pixy Cam is a fast vision sensor designed for robotics that can be hooked directly up to an Arduino for color blob tracking. The Arbotix is a Arduino style microprocessor designed to run the Dynamixel Servos.

I ended up using an Arduino Uno for driving the camera and calculating the servo angles and then used software serial to send the servo positions to the Arbotix via the digital pins. It works pretty well. Here’s a quick test video.