Book Image

Rapid BeagleBoard Prototyping with MATLAB and Simulink

Book Image

Rapid BeagleBoard Prototyping with MATLAB and Simulink

Overview of this book

As an open source embedded single-board computer with many standard interfaces, Beagleboard is ideal for building embedded audio/video systems to realize your practical ideas. The challenge is how to design and implement a good digital processing algorithm on Beagleboard quickly and easily without intensive low-level coding. Rapid BeagleBoard Prototyping with MATLAB and Simulink is a practical, hands-on guide providing you with a number of clear, step-by-step exercises which will help you take advantage of the power of Beagleboard and give you a good grounding in rapid prototyping techniques for your audio/video applications. Rapid BeagleBoard Prototyping with MATLAB and Simulink looks at rapid prototyping and how to apply these techniques to your audio/video applications with Beagleboard quickly and painlessly without intensive manual low-level coding. It will take you through a number of clear, practical recipes that will help you to take advantage of both the Beagleboard hardware platform and Matlab/Simulink signal processing. We will also take a look at building S-function blocks that work as hardware drivers and interfaces for Matlab/Simulink. This gives you more freedom to explore the full range of advantages provided by Beagleboard. By the end of this book, you will have a clear idea about Beagleboard and Matlab/Simulink rapid prototyping as well as how to develop voice recognition systems, motion detection systems with I/O access, and serial communication for your own applications such as a smart home.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Rapid BeagleBoard Prototyping with MATLAB and Simulink
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Video acquisition: Software driver


In Chapter 5, Digital I/O and Serial Communication, we discussed how to implement drivers for external devices. Similarly, the camera requires a driver as well. Nonetheless, the driver for a digital camera is usually much more complex than what we have done until now, and it may be worth another book to discuss how to implement such a driver. Thanks to the open-source community and MATLAB, the Video for Linux 2 (V4L2) API driver has been implemented for the BeagleBoard and is ready to use. Detailed information about V4L2 can be found at http://linuxtv.org/downloads/v4l-dvb-apis.

In this chapter we call the V4L2 driver directly to acquire the video stream from the Logitech C310 digital camera. As a benefit, we can focus on how to implement a motion detection algorithm based on existing video input.

To obtain the video stream from the Logitech C310 camera, simply open the Simulink library and add a V4L2 Video Capture block (as shown in the previous screenshot...