Suitable Microcontroller for my application.

[geowal19]

So I'm currently undertaking a project. The project is a 35mm film scanner using a CCD array. The analogue signal is clocked out of the CCD array at 1MHz and then converted with an ADC. There will be 2048 pixels per line of 8 bits, each monochrome. I'm not too hot on programming but I want to become better. I'm planning of using the MSP430F5529 micro controller to read the data from the ADC and write it to some memory. Once one image (out of the 36) has been read and written to the external memory it will then be written to an SD card. I'm using a BMP file for simplicity. I would like to write the code in the Arduino language however I think this is going to be far too slow for my 1MHz reading of the ADC and writing it to the memory. Could anyone help me by suggesting what I could do to solve my problem without scarifying speed? Should I just be going for a more powerful MCU?

Thanks

 

[alec_t]

Methinks you'll need amplification/conditioning of the CCD output to make it suitable for the ADC input. Have you considered that? With a 1MHz data rate the amplifier will need a good gain-bandwidth product.

 

[geowal19]

Yes the analogue side is well taken care of. The analogue side of things is more my thing.

 

[kubeek]

I am not sure that a 25MHz processor will be fast enough to read the data from the adc and store them in ram, even if the ADC was one with a parallel interface. Also if I am guessing right your picture is 2048x1536, which makes for about 3MB of data. Definitely no internal RAM can hold that much so you need to store it in external ram as well, which will take a few cycles if the processor doesnt directly support it.
I would suggest using an stm32f207 or similar procesor along with some sram or dram if you really need to keep up with that 1Mhz clock. So my choice would be some cheap devlopment board like this one https://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/LN1848/PF252419 and you only need to connect the sram to it, everything else is already done for you.

 

[ronsimpson]

I agree that you need more power. If you go for a $20 board then why not a $35 board? The raspberry pie has a high speed 32 bit computer that can drive a TV or monitor. It might help the development to see on a monitor the image from the CCD. You will not need to add more memory.

 

[geowal19]

Thank you for your replies. I don't want to use the rasberry pi because I want to be able to integrate the IC directly into my design, the r pi board will not fit with my design.

I will look into using the ST part. Yes I have come to conclusion 1MHz might be too optimistic, I think I'll start with 200kHz and some external memory an go from there. My image is 2000x3000 approx.

 

[Gobbledok]

If you are looking at an ST product, why not have a look at the STM32F429 discovery.

It is a 180MHz microcontroller with 8MB of SDRAM on board and a small LCD display with touch screen. A single ADC is capable of 2.4MSPS or up to 7.2MSPS in interleaved mode. It also has a built-in programmer/debugger. There are lots of examples on ST's website including a professional graphics library, an RTOS, FAT file system, JPEG decoder/encoder and many, many peripheral examples.

It is not really suitable for your own design (it may be) but it gives you a good, cheap platform to design your own from.