Inexpensive Low-res Black and white CCD camera?

Projects General Guidance
1

Hi all,

I have never done any projects with a camera before but am interested in doing the following.

Imagine a camera suspended in the air, pointing downwards, looking at the floor of a dark room. I position an LED somewhere on the floor, so all the camera sees is a bright spot in the darkness. I somehow read out the x,y position of that bright spot in the camera's field of view (i.e. find which pixel is the brightest -- there will be some gaussian lump of brightness and i find the center), and thereby track where the light is in x,y coordinates (which can be related back to true x,y coordinates by knowing the relative positions of the camera and the floor.

Now, I realize that a big color webcam or something is very complicated in terms of drivers etc and Arduino may not be able to handle it. So instead I'm wondering if there is a small low-resolution (like, 16x16 pixels) black and white CCD camera out there -- i.e. essentially just a small array of photodiodes with a lens over the top -- that I could use for this, so Arduino could interface directly with each pixel. Does anyone know of any sensors like that, or anyone that's done something similar with Arduino? I've looked around but all the projects I've seen have interfaced with computers via e.g. USB and a driver, rather than interfaced with a microcontroller. I'm trying to cut the computer out of this.

However if there is a better way, where I can use an actual higher-resolution camera, then please let me know that too.

Thanks!

2

Previous camera discussion below. There is a serial camera that appears to have worked to some extent with an arduino. For your project you might consider the internals of an optical mouse.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=camera&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.arduino.cc&as_occt=any&safe=off&tbs=&as_filetype=&as_rights=

3

This is the sort of thing that is inside a Wii controller. In fact it will do the tracking for you and give you up to 5 target's coordinates. You will need a blue tooth shield to interface to it without stripping it down.

4

Another option might be to use the Nootropic Design Video Experimenter shield (with a small b/w spy camera):

You could then adjust the resolution to whatever you want for the capture portion.

Another option might be to build such an array, but it wouldn't be easy; essentially, to keep the size down you would want to use SMT phototransistors, in a 16 x 16 array, and to read out the values you would use a circuit similar to the LED array driver circuits (with the exception that you would use a parallel-in/serial-out shift-register and select one of the 16 "banks" of phototransistors, latch over the data to the register, then clock it out - this is actually real similar to how an actual CCD imager works). You would then need to focus the image of the floor on the bank of transistors.

I'm not sure how well it would work; when I was 18 and going to tech-school, we did something similar but used regular sized phototransistors in an 8 x 8 matrix, connected via a similar arrangement to an Amiga (via the parallel port, IIRC) - so we didn't use a shift-register; but the idea is the same.