My original plan for making a robot with visual pattern recognition was to connect a camera to the raspberry pi, and then the raspberry pi to my laptop, and then I would run the raspberry pi ‘headless.’ That means, I would open up a remote terminal program on my laptop to access the raspberry pi’s desktop. The advantages of this are that I wouldn’t need a separate monitor or mouse or keyboard or wi-fi for the pi.

But this turned out to be one hassle after another. It turns out that you can’t configure a pi to be headless unless you first have it ‘headed.’ So you need all that stuff, in order to not need all that stuff. And then I couldn’t get the remote terminal program to work, and I would have to modify several files on the pi that I knew nothing about, let alone how to modify them in the first place . . . .

My second plan was to just do the pattern recognition programming on my laptop. It’s in python, and python is portable, right? So whatever I do on my laptop can be ported over to the pi, even though one is Windows and the other is Linux. Easy as. Nope, the webcam I got for the laptop has a mini-CD disk that clatters in the drive, and I couldn’t get SimpleCV to download at first, and then it wouldn’t work . . . and this got too complicated too.

So then I ended up getting all the peripherals for the pi after all. Today I connected the monitor, only to discover that the power supply that I ordered from Amazon is wrong. I bought the CanaKit power supply, thinking that since it was on the Tontec monitor page, that it was for the Tontec monitor. No, it’s for the raspberry pi, and because people who buy the Tontec monitor also buy the raspberry pi (of course), they also buy the CanaKit power supply for the raspberry pi. And that’s why it ends up on the Tontec monitor page even though it doesn’t connect to it. My fault.

This is what you see in the picture. I still can’t get the thing up and running because I need a power supply for the monitor. That will come next week. I suppose I’m in no hurry.

Anyhow, here are the links for the Tontec monitor and the correct power supply, in case you want to check them out:

Tontec 7″ LCD display screen for raspberry pi

Tontec power supply for the above

Until I get the power supply, I can’t vouch how this stuff works, but you can see the ratings on the Amazon pages.

BTW, I saw a demonstration of the Pixy(cam) Pet robot on Saturday, and it’s a good example of what can be done with robot vision. Here is a Youtube video of the Pixy Pet robot: