hi,
which cams for the NXT are available, are supported by RobotC, and can be recommended?
Mindsensor cam?
cmu cam?
avr cam?
anything else?

Right now, the mindsensors camera is the only one that can connect directly to the NXT without modifying or making converter.

The mindsensors camera is very nice, and there is demo RobotC code already made for it. I recommend this camera.

It is very sensitive to the visible and infrared color spectrum, and can be used with filtered lenses to detect colors or infrared sources.

Scott B-)

I believe the Mindsenors camera is derived from the AVRCam with modifications to work via a NXT i2C port for robot operation and use of a USB port (instead of a serial port) for configuration.

AVRCam and CMUCam cannot directly talk to a NXT because they both use a TTL level serial port. I think they both operate at 115 kbps. This type of interface is not available on the NXT. The only high speed interface on NXT is the RS-485 port on sensor port four.

I meanwhile got many problems with the Mindsensor Cam, because the color recognition was awfully bad (all over red-in-red pictures).
The 2nd cam I got in exchange couldn't be recognized by NxtCamView via USB at all.
Both meanwhile have been returned to mindsensors for refund.

But moreover the image processing speed was very slow- too slow for object detecting while driving around.

I'd wish there were some blob patterns already to be downloaded to the cam - sth. like the old Vision Command patterns (1 centered circle, or 5 circles arranged in a line, ore 8 in a block, which all easily can be programmed to light-, color-, or movement recognition; the NxtCamView was too complicated to me) .