Now in the closing few days of its Kickstarter campaign the Pixy camera board from Carnegie Mellon is an interesting departure from cameras intended to be connected to micro-controllers like the Arduino. It isn’t just another camera, it’s a “smart” vision sensor.
Pixy has its own processor and connects to your micro-controller board through one of several interfaces: UART serial, SPI, I2C or simply through a digital or analog pin. Rather than providing raw image data to the micro-controller, instead it analyses the images on-board and sends more useful data—actionable data—to your micro-controller, e.g. a red ping-pong ball has been detected at x=54, y=103. Although even without an attached micro-controller board attached Pixy can use its digital and analog outputs to trigger switches or servos, which means that you can use it to drive simple robots without any programming.
Pixy — teaching micro-controller boards to see [Make]