Night vision and Vex camera

Hi all,

Has anyone experimented with an Infrared illuminator with the Vex camera? I want to give my Vexplorer night vision capabilites.

Thanks,
C.

Haven’t tried it, but a quick test is to aim an IR remote at the VEXplorer camera and see if it picks up the IR flashes. If it does, then an IR illuminator should work with it OK.

Cheers,

  • Dean

That would only work if the VEXplorer Camera can see infrared. Which I doubt it does.

Quazar beat me too it.

Actually, most CCD-based cameras can see near-IR just fine. That covers the same spectrum that IR LEDs generally emit, so if you don’t mind using an IR “floodlight” I suspect it would work.

CCDs can’t see the far-IR part of the spectrum spectrum that passive thermal imaging requires, so it isn’t “night vision” in the military sense of the phrase.

Cheers,

  • Dean

Even if it normally can not see infrared it is likely that there is a infrared blocking lens in the camera which can easily be removed. Even with the lens removed i doubt that the sensitivity of the camera to infrared is great enough. With my modified infrared webcam I can see and read things with only infrared light from 5 LEDs but only at very short distances like 6 inches. You either must put 20+ LEDs or modify the lens. I am going to purchase a camera lens from radio shack that will collect more that 13x more light in the infared spectrum. You must also keep in mind that since infrared has a diffrent wavelength than normal light the refraction off the lens will be slightly diffrent changing the proper focus. I used exposed camera film, which does not collect infrared, to block all visible light from hitting my camera so it only sees infrared.

i just tried it with the line follower sensor sense it uses infrared and it shows up as a little white dot

There is a huge difference between pointing the infrared LED straight at the camera and being able to pick up reflected infrared. Even i can see the infrared light coming out of a LED if i point it straight at my eye in a dark room (try it), but that doesn’t mean i can see the light reflect off a wall. The amount of light coming from the LED source is of much greater intensity than the the light reflecting off a surface.

all i was getting at was that it could pick up infrared light

Awesome! gotta get an infared LED and try that!

And to see something in IR don’t you need a special camera? Like that spy night vision goggles for like $30. Maybe you can hack something out of that…

Hope this helps:)

The Vexplorer camera (which are the same as the VEX version one) will “see” at least 880mn which is invisible to humans. I know this because I own a couple of Infrared lasers (don’t ask why). I don’t know how far beyond that frequency they can see but the primary factor will be the strength and proximity of the infrared source.

Quasar was right to mention remote controls I used to work in electronics retail and the first thing we would do to troubleshoot a broken remote was to shine it at a camc order with new batteries. Dead batteries was the problem more than 70% of the time.

You may probably need a relatively large array of 24 or more IR LEDs to illumniate a short distance.

That sounds sweet. Night vision capabilities for a vex robot