SparkFun Forums

[lost_student]

Hi guys I'm a 1st year student learning about microcontrollers and i'm stuck with a project . Could you give me some directions and opinions? Like the title stated my project is 'Intergrating board camera to microcontroller and LCD'

Currently my project layout is like this


B/W Board Camera
||
||
PIC 18F452 MicroController <---> External Memory
||
||
LCD Screen


Currently we are trying to get our concepts right by using a b/w board camera connected to a PIC18F452 chip.

PIC18F452 datasheet :
http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/D ... 39564b.pdf

Problems faced Currently:
==================
The problem faced is how do I get the microcontroller to recognize the camera digital signals which comprises of 1s and 0s when a picture is taken? I have put my D+ and D- camera ouputs into my microcontroller inuts (PORTA).

Should I get a LCD with a intergrated memory or should I get another microcontroller that supports external memory?

[busonerd]

hmm... I really couldn't tell you anything more without a camera datasheet.

D+/D- sound like a differential pair, USB is ususally named that way... If it is indeed a differential pair, it could be clocking too fast for your micro to follow.

Anyhow - I can't give you an answer that has any high chance of accuracy without the datasheet.

Cheers,

--David Carne

[lost_student]

Heres the link to our camera :

http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/54643.pdf

Thanks for replying so fast =)

[busonerd]

Ok, that camera spits out an analog signal! - Second, are you sure there's a D+/-? looks to me like its just a single analog line out. You'll need something to turn the analog NTSC signal the camera spits out into something the microcontroller can understand - and I don't think the microcontroller ADC can sample fast enough.

I suggest you talk to your TA / Prof re this, because with the parts you have in hand right now, I do not think its doable.

Cheers,

--David Carne

[lost_student]

thanks for the info, my bad for confusing you on the camera. So how do we intergrate the analog camera to the microcontroller? and why so is the sampling rate not fast enough? Is it slow for picture applications?

[busonerd]

Well, the camera is gonna be spitting about 30fps, @ 512*582, which is 8.9Megapixels / second. [As far as I can tell]. An example acquisition time in the pic datasheet puts the Tacq @ 12.86 us, which gives you only 0.077Megasamples / second - which is obviously less than 8.9MP/s.
I suggest you get some kind of purpose build video dac, or get a camera with an onboard framebuffer. Running an analog camera into a micro is NOT what I would choose as a first year project.

--David Carne

[lost_student]

ok point noted, actually I tried using a digital camera which is a webcam but was unable to hack into their firmware for details thus abandoning the idea. Could you offer me some suggestions of which camera to use if I was to stick with the same controller?

[busonerd]

I've heard good things about the CMU-CAM, never seen it in action though.

Apparently its quite easy to use.

--David Carne

[phalanx]

Even running on a clocked to the max dsPIC with a 10-bit A/D, you will only get 2 million samples/sec which is still not fast enough.

This would be the perfect project for an FPGA based design. The FPGA is more than fast enough to handle all of the data acquisition when hooked up to a high speed A/D. It can also handle the memory interface for storage and the display routine to your LCD panel or even a VGA monitor with room to spare.

-Bill

[ohararp]

CMUCAM2+ are pretty cool and are really easy to work with since it is all serial input and output. Defnitely worth a look. Depeding on what you are doing they have some neat color tracking features as well.

[helloseth]

Take a look at this project over at Parallax.com
http://forums.parallax.com/forums/defau ... 5&m=131097

There a guy is making a 'PropCam' device using their new Propeller MCU. Pretty cool MCU, 8 32bit cores on one chip.

He is making a product for sale, but I don't know about the cost. He is using a B/W camera and processing the image and can output the image on a video monitor.

Seth

[bikeNomad]

I've heard good things about the CMU-CAM, never seen it in action though.

Apparently its quite easy to use.

See the Seattle Robotics site for more on the CMU cam

I have a CMU Cam that I bought but never got around to using. If anyone is interested, I could put it up on my eBay store. I don't recall which it was (I think it was CMU Cam I).