Pleo Camera Limitations

The on board Pleo camera takes pictures in QCIF format, which is 176×144 pixels. The image is able to be saved in either .bmp or .raw formats.

The command to test the camera and capture an image is camera capture <filename> [bmp|raw] [new|last]

For example, “camera capture test.bmp” takes a picture and stores it as test.bmp

The camera is sometimes unreliable as a blank image can occur after issuing the command to take a picture.

Images are saved to SD card which means it is not possible to extract and analyze them in real time. There is also no way to stream live video.

It is possible to use pawn code for blob tracking, but this would need to be written in pawn, compiled and loaded onto an SD card ahead of time. It would be very challenging to implement any blob tracking or optical character recognition in C++ using the onboard camera, as any C++ solution would basically need to “trigger” a pawn command to track images. It would not be possible to pass parameters such as colors or shapes to the pawn script in real time.

In summary, it is not possible to view real-time camera output from the onboard camera in C++. It appears that most other groups have utilized external cameras.