Linux and processor speed

[silo_xtreme]

Hi Everyone,

I'm considering building my new robot and eventually upgrade it with vision processing.  Is Linux the way to go or can I stick with my AVR?  What is the minimum RAM and Processor Speeds to do edge / blob detection?

I'm just wondering what your experiences have been....

Mike

[hgordon]

Depends on what image resolution you want to support.  We're using a 500MHz Blackfin processor with 32Mbytes of SDRAM, and that seems to be a pretty good combination for real-time image processing on 320x256 to 640x512 resolution.

[silo_xtreme]

Excellent!  What kind of image processing do you do on the black fin?

[hgordon]

There's a large collection of assembly-language optimized image processing functions for Blackfin here -
    http://www.analog.com/processors/blackfin/technicalLibrary/manuals/codeExamples.html

We've written some simple blob functions for our standard firmware ( http://www.surveyor.com/SRV_protocol.html ), but this only scratches the surface of what is possible.

[dunk]

i have some notes on my efforts in this direction:
http://mrdunk.googlepages.com/processor and http://mrdunk.googlepages.com/sensors.

although i have not documented my efforts on that page
i've recently been working with the Hammer board from http://www.tincantools.com/
which looks like it's a good alternative.

in my experience when trying to do image processing on limited embedded linux processors memory is more important than processor speed.


dunk.