Other homemade camera ideas

Archive New Product Ideas
1

Hi,

The TCM8240 camera thread is still plugging along…but I suspect it won’t be on anyones project list until someone comes up with an affordable FPGA solution.

Oh well…

Have been looking at other ideas, and the old Gameboy camera seems interesting.

It appears to have some sort of basic image processing (I’ve seen references to ‘artificial retina’ and a resolution of 128x123 or thereabouts. The gameboy interface used it poorly, only doing 4bits per pixel and dithering…but the chip itself can be taken out.

The control is via some digital control lines, and output is analog…so presumably a micro could read it via ADC and output to SD card at whatever pixel greyscale is appropriate. Question is how fast would everything have to be.

Has anyone done this? Been looking but can’t find any active links, there was a link to someone who connected it to a parallel port…but it’s not active anymore.

Any links to the datasheet?

Phil

2

Interesting…

Been looking at similar things. Came across this - datasheets aren’t great, but it looks promising.

http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/uart-c … p-209.html

These ones are connected to a daughter board with a SD card slot. Haven’t looked at the data sheet for these yet.

http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/enhanc … p-212.html

Might be too easy though…

3

Hi there,

Here’s the datasheet on the Mitsubishi “Artificial Retina” M64282FP chip, used in the Gameboy Cameras:

http://www.seattlerobotics.org/encoder/ … 4282FP.pdf

I picked up a few of these a number of years ago, but never ended up doing anything with them. At 128x128, they’re not very big image sensors by today’s standards, and they’re just greyscale. The really neat thing about these is that they had onboard edge detection, which would be neat for some robotics applications.