Next Steps

The current setup gets in the mid 80%'s on easy and can beat medium songs, but there are a few things that could be improved:

1) Webcam - the webcam used here is a Dlink camera from 1999. A newer camera would have vastly better image quality and hopefully a higher frame rate. I recently got a D90, and I think with some work I could use this as the camera instead of my crappy old webcam.

2) Code - The current code could probably be sped up by using a different method to get the webcam image. Currently it uses some code I found online and improved upon that uses WIA drivers. I'm also getting frame rate dropouts, which is why it is missing notes. It hits 100% of the notes that it see's, but misses notes when it gets no new frames.

3) Relays - I built this using 15A 12V relays. They are an order of magnitude slower than a reed relay which would have been much easier to use, but I wanted to be able to use this setup to run as a light controller in the future and a reed relay can't handle that kind of juice. Stepping up to reed relays or even some sort of IC would speed up response time a lot.



Am I going to try to improve upon the current setup? Probably not, but maybe if I was really bored. I did this to prove it could be done with a webcam, now I know it can.

Video of Arduino beating Guitar Hero