Ucam Jpeg Serial Camera

[jacqueskleynhans]

Does anyone have experience with this camera, interfacing to PIC.

Thx
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"THE ONLY EASY DAY WAS YESTERDAY"

[jacqueskleynhans]

HI All , I found a library for the c328 camera http://gizmologi.st/2009/04/taking-pictures-with-arduino/comment-page-2/#comments. Can someone assist me in porting it for use with pic.

It might make a nice addition to everyones libraries

Kind Regards
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"THE ONLY EASY DAY WAS YESTERDAY"

[PCM programmer]

If you want help, you need to post a link to the camera data sheet that
describes the communication protocol and command set. And post the
model number of the camera. Post your PIC. We are not mind-readers.

[jat]

Could you help me interface this camera http://www.cutedigi.com/security-and-spy-camera/weather-proof-jpeg-serial-port-camera-with-infrared-rs232.html with PIC?

Thank you.

[Ttelmah]

Seriously, what do you actually want to 'do' with this?.

Thing is that it returns jpeg pictures. Small size, but useless if you want to perform anything like edge recognition. The code to decode this, will be a major task in itself. Then though the amount of data will be quite small for the smallest images, it'll still be more than most PIC's can handle. You could relatively simply read an image, and transfer it to something like an SD card (only a matter of having the FAT libraries, then a SD card, opening a jpeg file, and writing the core of the data packet to this). However any idea of doing anything more with an image, is beyond the capabilities of most PIC's.
The actual interface code is very simple (just standard serial). However anything beyond this, and you are making work hard for yourself.
Though the PIC's are at times surprisingly 'able', it is not the sort of task they were designed to do. 'Possible', perhaps, depending as I say on what you actually want to 'do'. However whether there is much point, especially given the huge number of chips better designed for this, is questionable...

Best Wishes

[jgschmidt]

I used a similar LinkSprite camera to build a "game trail" camera. A PIR sensor gets triggered by animals, IR LEDs turn on and a series of pictures get taken. I used a PIC24 to read the JPEG data from the camera and write it to an SD card. I was not planning on doing any image processing. It works, however:
1) the documentation for the sensor and the image processor (which uses an 8051 core) is terrible. These devices are made in China for use by Chinese engineers who embed them in products made in China.
2) speed is slow - supposedly there is a way to get a fast serial or SPI interface but the documentation was lacking. The docs also describe features that do not work in this product. This was widely commented on and lamented in various forums.
3) there is no flow control on the serial data so you have to slow things down to avoid losing data while you're downloading packets.
For my project I found an Arduino library as a starting point and converted it to CCS and modified as necessary. I used Andrew Smallridge's SD libraries for writing the data and bootloading.
You can buy game cameras like this at a sporting goods store for less than $100 but my customer wanted certain features and was willing to pay me to reinvent the wheel.

You can get the bare camera from Adafruit, without accessories, for $40. There are links to data sheets and the Arduino libraries at Adafruit.

If you are interested in image processing you might also look at

http://www.cmucam.org/
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Jürgen
www.jgscraft.com

[ckielstra]

Wow, the camera at cutedigi.com costs $89. That's a lot of money for a 0.3Mpixel camera.
I'm curious about the project Jat is going to do, because for that kind of money there are many more options. Heck, even a cheap Arduino phone with integrated camera will give better resolution and has all libraries ready available.