how to connect a phone-camera to a PC via USB?

Using Arduino Project Guidance
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I guys,
I am working on a robot should have a hi-quality camera and should take a transfer pictures on demand to a computer via a USB cable.
The first and obvious thing would be to use a webcam, but even with the best webcam image quality was rather poor.

So I thought about using a replacement camera from an iPhone or Galaxy, as they are cheap ( <30$ ) and produce very good pictures.

Now the question - are there any boards that allow connecting such cameras to USB?
Or at least do this cameras use some standard protocol or do they have their own one?

Thanks )

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Well I don't know what part the Arduino plays in this, I don't think it has a place.

The Raspberry Pi has a high def camera that is quite cheap and perhaps is a more suitable platform for this project.

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What about his…

https://www.sparkfun.com/search/results?term=camera

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Artem85:
even with the best webcam image quality was rather poor.

I don't know what you consider 'the best' web cam but web cams are available with relatively good resolution. What image resolution are you looking for?

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I think low light performance may be an issue. Webcams are available in 1080p resolution.

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1023×571 795 KB

Here's a quality I was able to get from a webcam and galaxy s3 ( scaled down by half ).
I am looking for something that would be able to produce pictures of the s3 quality.
There are a few "5mp camera modules" on aliexpress and such, but since they are not showing any sample photos, I doubt that their quality is any better then of a webcam...

So the only solution is to try to use a camera module from a phone.

P.S.
Another option might be finding a photo camera that can be controlled via the usb...

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Unfortunately, you won't be able to use a camera module from a cellphone, unless you have this:

  • Full datasheet for the sensor
  • In-depth knowledge of Cellphone-camera protocol
    decoding (SMIA)
  • A fast enough ARM processor/FPGA with subLVDS (CCP/CCI) interface & enough fast SRAM to store the data

Good luck!

// Per.

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Artem85:
There are a few "5mp camera modules" on aliexpress and such, but since they are not showing any sample photos, I doubt that their quality is any better then of a webcam...

There's no grounds for that doubt. As a general rule the greater the number of pixels the better the image quality will be. Since you only showed a composite of the two images and not the raw images I have no way to know what the resolution of the webcam images was. The 'web cam' part was obviously much poorer quality and presumably came from a low resolution camera. The S3 has an 8MP camera so a 5MP web cam will not be quite as good resolution but it should be close. The camera resolution (and optical quality) is what matters - not the way that it is connected to the PC. Once you get close, note that camera settings can have a significant impact on the image quality.

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The camera I spoke of earlier is a 5 Mega pixel camera

Applications and examples:-
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/tag/camera-board

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Actually there is a way to do this. I'm surprised no one here knows this. There are apps for android that can make android phone act as a web cam.

Some of them are "Droid cam" and the open source "Smart cam". Use can use bluetooth, Wifi or USB.

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Ufoguy, the idea was to use the cam without the phone. :slight_smile:
Anyway, I found out that Canon has SKD fot C#, so I guess using some cheap PowerShot camera would be the best solution.

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Oh, you came to my solution. I was just thinking I've used both Canon PowerShot (S45) and now Canon DSLR, both came with remote shooting software, and the SDK gets you in.

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