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A sensor that can detect all kinds of things will suck up a lot of battery, especially in a camera. Charmed Labs and Carnegie Mellon University teamed up to create a cheap and efficient vision sensor, and the Pixy was born.

Pixy launched on Kickstarter and has 12 days left with more than $125,000 past its original $25,000 goal. It has promise to focus on colors and you can program Pixy to detect hues by holding objects in front of it. Every time Pixy sees it, it can follow, or capture specific data.  It's also totally open source and customizable.

The device can output to UART serial, SPI, I2C, digital out, or analog out, a PC/Mac app called PixyMon shows what the sensor is seeing when plugged in, and of course Pixy can be hooked to a microcontroller like an Arduino for use in other projects. Check it out in the video below: [KickStarter via PetaPixel]