Interfacing PIC with a camera (TTL?) - help, feasibility

[Fordy]

Hi, I'm planning a project which involves a camera.

This is the camera I'm considering: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10061

If you know of one that would be easier, or is higher resolution (I'd like XVGA or above) please let me know. On that site, there is a 1300x1040 model, but no-one seems to have had much success with it - citing porr, and lack of, documentation.


I've never done anything like this, so I have some questions:

1. Can I control the camera with a PIC?
2. How would I go about saving the stills to SD, I assume the PIC cannot store them temporarily, so they must bypass it?
3. How hard do you think this would be?

I realise it would be easier to rip out the internals from an existing digital camera, let the PIC replace the shutter button, and everything else is already done.

But I'm sure you understand that I'd quite like the satisfaction of making it myself (almost) ground-up.



Thanks in advance,

 

[Sceadwian]

The question you haven't answered is what are you trying to do with this? The resolution on that module you linked is very very low, not usable for a human just barely enough for a basic micro controller vision system, and even that would be very difficult to manage.

Again without knowing what you're trying to do there is no way to properly repsond.

 

[Fordy]

Well, it's VGA resolution, which is perfectly viewable.

I'm trying to simply make the camera take a still every 5sec and save them to SD in some sort of standard format, JPEG for instance.

 

[Ian Rogers]

Does it need a micro.. I bought a security light for £100 https://cpc.farnell.com/jsp/displayProduct.jsp?sku=SR0720596&CMP=aballbrochure

For that price and the pictures / video are relly good quality.

 

[Fordy]

Does it need a micro.. I bought a security light for £100 https://cpc.farnell.com/jsp/displayProduct.jsp?sku=SR0720596&CMP=aballbrochure

For that price and the pictures / video are relly good quality.

That's completely different product and application to what I'm after.


I'm a) trying to make it myself, and b) after something small and light.

 

[Gobbledok]

Hi, I'm planning a project which involves a camera.

I've never done anything like this, so I have some questions:

1. Can I control the camera with a PIC?
2. How would I go about saving the stills to SD, I assume the PIC cannot store them temporarily, so they must bypass it?
3. How hard do you think this would be?

1. I don't see why not. On smaller PIC's with less features you will be working it hard but it would be do-able.
2. Even the latest PIC32's don't have enough RAM to store even one frame at VGA resolutions so yes you would have to output the frame at the same time as reading it. If you use a bigger PIC with DMA it should make it easier and quicker for you. The DMA module can deal with the transfers while the CPU is doing other stuff.
3. Well that depends on your skill

 

[Fordy]

Thanks for your help, but what's a DMA?

And my response to that should be a good indication as to my skill level!

 

[ronsimpson]

DMA is Direct Memory Access. It is a way of moving data from one place to another with out the CPU doing it.
Example: Move 100 bytes of data from IO pins to memory starting at location 1000, move at 100khz rate. Then DMA is working the CPU is not involved. It happens in the background.

I want to use this camera but, PICs have small RAMs. Even if I set the resolution to 'low' there is not enough memory. The video is in JPEG format. I don't think the PIC can uncompress the JPEG format. I just need to know if a small area is red or green.

 

[3v0]

Perhaps the camera understand XON XOFF?

 

[alec_t]

I just need to know if a small area is red or green.

You might be better off just using a color-to-frequency IC (can't recall the number) with a lens in front.

 

[Sceadwian]

Might want to look into https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cmucam/home.html It does the image/colour searching onboard.