The biggest current problems I have with Phase 1 are just around video, mainly due to buying cheap shit electronics from China - the camera image itself is surprisingly clear, but the refresh rate is low and you can't see anything when there's vibration (ie driving fast). I have ordered a much better camera and mounting system from hobbyking, but seems they're waiting for stock to come in.
And then there's the very cheap USB video capture devices I bought - they were so cheap I got 4 for $36 including shipping! They're apparently DC60 devices; DC60+ are apparently *completely* different and do work on mac and better in general. That's probably why they were so cheap. They're ok for just checking what the camera is seeing, but the driver support is very low, there are no drivers for mac, so I can't write a program to integrate the video from it. There is only one decent program I've found that lets you see the image, EasyCapViewer, which is a mac port of a Linux driver. Unfortunately, it's only a standalone program, and doesn't create devices I could use in another program. And it's written in some language I don't know which uses .m source files - Objective-C maybe? I would rather write in Python or even Java. I've hacked up a basic UI in Processing but it doesn't integrate with the video at all.
So I'm also looking for better capture devices but everything on ebay is variations of the same chip. Also everything is geared towards either viewing your console game in real time or capturing VHS tapes to DVD, so there aren't general drivers that you could plug into any software. Nothing seems available in USB which is a shame because I wanted to use my laptop so I can move around with it. I will try a PC video card capture just to see if that works better.
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