Hello,
I wanted to write this post as a suggestion, in terms of some camera features. Mainly I wanted to make this about two parts; issues with the current implementation for ov7670 and request for added support, specifically for ov5640
In terms of current support for ov7670, while it’s great to see this support exists, it’s not without issues. First issue is that appear to be green and pink artifacts around certain areas, and secondly despite being supposed to use DMA the camera transfer takes up a lot of cpu time, being very limiting for video transform framerates. While both of these may seem like hardware limitations, they’re not. Using the exact same setup, but instead running openMV micropython, the camera data capture is way faster and there are no artifacts. Further, openMV and Arduino are official partners, so if Arduino requested help in terms of fixing this, I believe it’s likely openmv would be able to provide it.
Secondly, there’s a bit of a lack of supported cameras. While it’s great to have options, all the current options are very old, and have a limited frame rate at higher resolutions as well as very limited image quality. While I understand there’s a limit to what can be supported, I think adding ov5640 would be a great and not too difficult addition. In terms of difficulty, this camera works with giga r1 using openmv, so it would just need to be ported to work with Arduino, where again openmv is a partner of Arduino. While the camera isn’t the newest, it has a much higher image quality and better capabilities, including auto focus, and it would be a great addition for people working on projects that involve cameras and especially video feed.
That would be great!
As far as I can tell, there is no one at Arducam nor Arduino that appears like they
are owning or updating anything with the camera support for the Giga.
For example, I don't believe they have commented on any of the issues that have been
raised. Nor the Pull Request I created, to fill in some of the APIs that were not implemented. The last (and only) commits on their library were 10 months ago.
Would be good if they did.
Note: I have not done much lately with the Giga Camera stuff. Been instead playing with the cameras on a Teensy (Micromod and 4.1). We now have some support there for the 5640 using ones from Adafruit as well as the 2640 (Arducam one as well as Waveshare one). Another interesting capability of these cameras is you can also have them return the image using JPEG format.