I recently received a broken DELL laptop screen and managed to get the camera out of it. I noticed that the connector pins are labeled. It seems pretty straight forward. There are two pins, however, that I don't know about; 'MCSG' and 'MCGD'. There are 5 other pins: D+, D-, 3V3, and GND.
Inevitably I'd like to TRY interfacing to it. I have poked around in the forums here an I have seen a lot of negative responses about interfacing with arduino and cameras. I understand that the ATMega 328 is not powerful enough to do anything spectacular with digital imaging. I am only interested in seeing what I CAN do with this.
I don't have any funding to work on any of my other projects.. So I'd like to maybe try learning about the technology behind digital imaging hardware.
you can always put a 3.3 volt regulator and power it like that
you could get 3.3V with a regulator.. the issue isn't the supply voltage, though. its that the signals from the computer will be at 5V, regardless if you regulated the supply voltage..
"USB signals are transmitted on a twisted-pair data cable with 90[ch937] ±15% Characteristic impedance,[46] labeled D+ and D[ch8722]. Prior to USB 3.0, these collectively use half-duplex differential signaling to reduce the effects of electromagnetic noise on longer lines. Transmitted signal levels are 0.0–0.3 volts for low and 2.8–3.6 volts for high in full-bandwidth and low-bandwidth modes, and [ch8722]10–10 mV for low and 360–440 mV for high in hi-bandwidth mode."
Providing it's not an Arduino, you interface it to. It's woefully short of grunt to do anything video or even image related. That's after you work out how to connect it......
Providing it's not an Arduino, you interface it to. It's woefully short of grunt to do anything video or even image related. That's after you work out how to connect it......
It means that you have to connect this thing to a PC because it is a USB device. You can't connect it to an arduino directly as the interface on an arduino is not a USB master but a USB slave, just like your web cam. So you have nothing you can connect the arduino to.
So let's assume you get it going through your PC, then what, your PC won't give you video out from the camera so you are relegated to poking around in the innards of your camera looking at signals. Suppose you did find one that by some miracle had a video signal on it what then? The arduino isn't powerful enough to do much with this signal as it is going very fast.
Try a Gameboy Camera instead, they are much easier to interface to and have edge recognition built in.
Thank you. I'll consider that next time I'm on ebay and actually have money.
It means that you have to connect this thing to a PC because it is a USB device.
I understand that the USB port on the arduino board is a slave. Why cant it be possible for the arduino to imitate a USB master. Perhaps on two of the I/O pins? With appropriate circuitry and programming, of course. I don't think you quite understand how bored I am. :-/
The Arduino is a 8 bit microcontroller with 2K ram, the best it could do with a static image is download it in very small chunks and move it somewhere else (slowly) for storage. Video (the high speed data stream the webcam will produce) would completely swamp it. Its akin to trying to manage a tsunami with a bucket.
Can you source liquid Nitrogen and a 6.0 Ghz clock?
I think it would be good if you could get the number of the chip on that camera board or the model number of the laptop it was on. You can only interface this with a computer regardless of what you do. If you manage that you can say you accomplished something.
Thank you for that. I hadn't noticed. Regardless, I still don't know how to wire it up. I know what 3V3, D+, D-, and GND are. However, what about the other pins?
