Is there any guidance on how to get arduino to capture an image or video feed to send to an LED matrix? I can get the matrix working on its own but when it comes to getting the video feed from the camera to the arduino and then to the matrix, i get lost. any help?
The Arduino doesn't have enough memory to process a whole image, as far as I know. You would have better luck using a computer to "read" the webcam and send data to the arduino, controlling the matrix.
is there no way to pixelate the image feed? say like the matrix i have is the mini 8x8, could i not pixelate the image 8x8 and send the image to the arduino as a still?
On the computer, yes. There definitely is a way to calculate the average brightness and color of 64 parts of an image, but I think the easiest way to convey that to the arduino would be to send 64 bytes of info, one for each pixel, or more data if it is a multiple color matrix.
But the arduino definitely cannot do this on its own with a normal webcam. Maybe if you could find a super low-res camera, I think the ones in optical mice are pretty low res.
Here's something promising!:
http://www.bidouille.org/hack/mousecam/
No, you can't do it.
Also you'd be surprised at how unrecognisable things become on an 8x8 matrix if the LEDs are only either on or off - i.e. you aren't doing grey scaling.
Check out the Video Peggy - Video Peggy in action | Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. It uses a webcam connected to a PC to capture the data, the Processing language is then used to format the image data into a 25 x 25 matrix with 16 levels of grey. This matrix is then sent to the peggy board (which is essentially an arduino connected to the large LED matrix) for display. This happens 25 times every second.
Notice the PC is required for doing the image capture stuff. Also note the image quality at 25x25, and imagine it at 8x8 before you commit to your project.
THAT SAID, don't give up just because I say so! It'd be a good learning experience to get it all working. You might be able to grab their processing code, and modify it to display an 8x8 non-greyscale matrix - that way you could see what it'd look like first.