I would like to do some experimenting with capturing pictures using some of the low-cost camera hardware that is around. I was wondering if anyone had recommendations on the a good place to start. I would like to capture the pictures using an AVR or PIC devlopment board. What would be a good way to begin?
Actually, I was thinking more of using an AVR or PIC to capture a still frame from something like a phone camera. I am looking around for cheap still digital camera-type hardware.
The cheapest cameras are USB based. So, the best way is to control them with an AVR USB host such as AT90USB647 or AT90USB1287. What are you going to do with the picture, after getting it into the uC?
You might search google for "astronomy quickcam", as in years past the parallel port based connectix quickcams have been popular for astrophotography. Some of the developed code might be portable to a eight bit parallel input chip.
On a sunny day (Sun, 26 Aug 2007 23:23:01 +0200) it happened Martin Griffith wrote in :
Well I have reservations about that approach (not to the astro cam). If you really want to use 'camera hardware' with an FPGA board, then perhaps go TCP, use a camera like this, and the software is open source:
formatting link
(I wrote it), running Linux on an FPGA board with eitehrnet these days is not that expensive. But, this camera is about 130$ and the FPGA board will be some more.
If you REALLY want to do hardware, get a CMOS sensor, and interface it to some FPGA IO lines. That is CHEAP. In both cases you will need lots of memory, upping the price and complexity. Somebody did a VHDL version for the mcam (8 bit parallel port) webcam
formatting link
but I cannot find the paper anymore with google. The par port versions are way to slow for fun.
I guess with Linux and USB on a FPGA board you could use most cheap USB cams.
All depends on what you want, if yo uhave enough memory for a frame store you can also run Linux...
So the essense is use the sensor directly and get some cheap lens. National has whole range of simple CMOS sensors IIRC.
And then what? compress to some format? Maybe have a look at the Altera site for algos and boards?
Or just forget it and use a PC, proabbly cheaper :-)
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.