Camera to CPU

Hey Guys,

I want to mount a camera on something and have it stream video back to a computer (CMOS?). If I can get the data off of the CMOS I can probably figure out how to get it to the computer and then reassembled. But I want to know if you think its possible to push that much data through an arduino board? And if anybody has seen a good CMOS/Arduino tutorial?

Thanks,
Pooh

It might be possible; I not sure what kind of frame rate you'll get (probably fairly low; reading the sensor won't be quick because of the number of pixels and data being streamed, then pushing that over the USB serial connection). You might also have issues connecting the CMOS sensor; I think they are serial though, so maybe number of pins available won't be an issue (no experience in this arena).

I do know there are serial camera modules that take jpeg images (nothing about video though), and you can read the data to the Arduino (and presumably thru it, or onto a SD card, because there isn't enough memory on the ATMega168/328 to store a frame). Sparkfun sells such a device and breakout board.

Is this a "just to see if it can be done" type project, or do you have a greater need to do this? Are you wanting to process video onboard the Arduino before sending it to the computer (ie, date/time stamp overlay or something)?

If your goal is to perform some kind of vision processing (or even the overlay stuff), there are better ways to go about doing it (real vision processing should be done on the full size PC anyway, if you want to do it in anything resembling near real-time).

I have personally found the Logitech Orbit AF web cameras to be the best consumer digital camera device available for this use, especially under Linux - there are other professional/industrial cameras that use Firewire and such that are better, but they are very expensive. On the processing side of things (for my purpose), my plan is to use OpenCV...

:slight_smile:

Seeing as how you are interfacing to the PC it's going to be 100000 times easier and 2 times cheaper to do this with a basic webcam.