I would like to dump a camera image to an array. I assume each element of the array would correspond to a pixel. This is not for a project , just to learn by doing. Does anyone know of a camera that can dump its output to an Arduino array that a Mega2560 can access? It does not have to be a great camera, just something simple i can muck around with. Thanks in advance. ——OR—— If that is not available, is there a kind of light sensitive “retna” (with a lens of course) where each pixel sensor can be accessed and querried: kind of like how a camera works but accessing the individual pixels at my leisure. Thank you again.
Have a look at ArduCam’s products, for example
https://www.arducam.com/arducam-5mp-plus-spi-cam-arduino-ov5642.html
There is a library for their products
Images take a lot of space in memory so some platforms won’t have enough bytes to even store one image in an array.
why the mega, not much ram??
you should try some esp32cams..
quite cheap, get a multi pack and make sure to get the daughter boards with the usb connectors so you don’t have to fuss around with ftdi adapters..
you can code these cams with Arduino..
have fun.. ~q
The ESP32-CAM has both camera and processor on one very inexpensive board.
Code is already available to capture and store an entire image in memory, and access it pixel by pixel. Look for tutorials by RandomNerd and others.
The easiest way to achieve your goal is to
- get ESP32Cam + “motherboard“. They are usually sold together.
- Look at any examples which initialize camera and make 1 shot.
- Change initialization, so output is not JPEG but RGB (there are few formats, like 5 bits per color component) or Grayscale (easier to play with)
- Capture 1 frame. Now you have RGB/Grayscale image data in an array.
Every camera output their data as arrays, but they return you a pointer. It is up to you to access this pointer as a 2D array of pixels or not.
It depends on the format and the RAM you have.
A camera module outputs a data stream over SPI, parallel, DVP, or a similar interface, not a pixel array per se.
Whether this stream represents pixels depends on the encoding. With formats like JPEG, the stream is compressed and does not contain explicit per-pixel values, since pixels are transformed, grouped, and entropy-coded.
If you have enough RAM, a higher-level API can receive the stream, store it, and hand it over as a structure. That structure may hold encoded data like JPEG, or actual pixel values if the output is uncompressed.
That stream based design let MCUs with limited RAM handle such cameras as receive and forward - like OP does on his small Arduino - get some bytes of the payload through SPI, save the buffer to SD and go get the next buffer until you got the full payload.
Thank you. I am going to check this out today.
I just looked into it thank you. I am going to order one to muck around with. I wonder if there is a seperate SD card module? Also WiFi module? I like seperate, discrete modules and not “all on one board” even though that is cheeper and mote efficent. Thank you again.
I am not up on the different cams available. But if i can find something that can also save an image to SDcard on command and send it via say WiFi on command that would be great for a seperate project i have!
an ESP32 would then be a good target MCU for that
You can host a small web site on it, you connect a camera module and an SD module or external FRAM module for storage and you are all good to go (with a bit of programming)
What are these two ICs? I found this camera in my local store but it is plain camera without anything extra
I mena the OV5642 as a device you connect via SPI / I2C to your MCU