General Wireless Cam Transmission Questions...

Wireless & IoT
1

In a project I’m currently working on I would like to take images obtained from a camera, and wirelessly stream them to a 24bit or 18bit lcd. Resolution of the LCD has yet to be determined, however i am certainly open to suggestions! I’m aware of a few cameras, similar to the CMUcam or AVRcam, but all of these seem to be a little overboard for my purposes.

I would prefer to use XBee 1 modules as the transmission medium, sending at 115200 bps to an AVR running at 20MHz via external oscillator. I understand that some sort of ARM or FPGA hardware is typically used to accomplish this task, but I have yet to work with either, and I dont know VHDL, so of course I am hoping this may be done with the hardware I’m already familiar with.

Main questions:

  1. Even if I can only recieve and display 1 fps, is this likely to be accomplished with the mentioned AVR/XBee hardware?

  2. Can anybody who is familiar with this sort of hardware suggest a cam to use, that is more suited for my purposes, while not incredibly difficult to work with. ie: possibly contained in dev board w/ driver, similar to the above mentioned cams.

  3. Any suggestions for 18/24bit LCD modules would be very much appreciated.

Again, as I have never worked with 18/24bit LCDs or cams, any advice to get me started would be very helpful. Thanks for looking!

2
  1. It depends on the resolution you want your images to be in, the compresion used, etc. An Atmega1280 has a realistic serial throughput of around 10 kB/s, the xbees should be in rougly the same ballpark. So you’ll be wanting to fit into this figure with some extra bandwidth to spare. You can fit a very good quality VGA JPEG into 20 kB, so that’ll get you around 0.5 Hz framerate.
3

well, i suppose it would be more realistic to use a 320x240 lcd with maybe 9-12 bit quality. i was looking into some of the nordic chips which can send data around 1mbps, rather than the xbees… from here, im not sure where to look next. im not really sure how the serialization of data is completed. also, is that an uncommon lcd res/quality to find?