why?
this topic has about 30 page’s
i read all of them
but there is no tutorial
i just get some useful info
if i can create webcam in full 1.4MP that is fantastic.
else if i can create a simple image camera in full 1.3MP that can create help lot
The TCM8240MD doesn’t have a USB interface.
so
there is must be a way that i can connect this to USB
by the way
there is no 1.3MP image sensor that have USB interface on sparkefun.com
You need a suitable MCU with a USB port.
which MCU can fit my needs?
what about VNC1L?
Question is…can YOU meet the needs of the chip in question?
The VNC1L is not an MCU in the traditional sense of the word.
You want camera to USB.
You can’t have camera directly to USB.
You can have camera to MCU thru a parallel & I2C interface.
You can also have a serial to USB interface (i.e. USB-serial converter board).
Therefore, you could…just like a number of posts have suggested in this thread…do…
Camera → Parallel/I2C interface → lots of memory via an MCU → serial → USB → PC
This camera is cheap, but not easy to work with, especially for the beginner.
Now then…(wait for it…wait for it)…
thanks a lot for your multi line answer
that was good.
thanks again if you list main parts that i should have to create this board.
i will learn how to connect them together myself.(i will try)
This thread has more than enough information to get you started...molavy2003:
thanks a lot for your multi line answerthat was good.
thanks again if you list main parts that i should have to create this board.
i will learn how to connect them together myself.(i will try)
Anyone interested in the computer/robotic vision applications of this camera might be interested to see the multiple color multiple object tracking I have up and running using it.
I have a problem that some of you have had, I get no ack for reading other adresses than 0x1f.
I get an ack for the slave addr, and if i send the wrong slave addr i get a nack.
But the second ack only comes if i read addr 0x1f. but the third ack never comes.
I can write to addr 0x1f, but no other addr.
What can the problem be?
EXTCLK is 10MHz
I2C clk is 5kHz.
2.8V and 1.5V is fine, I am interfacing with a pic32 at 2.8V
any ideas?
I solved it, Basicly I had no Ext_CLK.
So the device only listened for exit from sleep.
Hi everyone,
I’ve gotten images from the 8230 successfully so I thought I’d document the approach I took. My goal was to try and use as few components as possible, and do things in software where I could. I used an XMega (ATXMEGA16D4) as the main chip, and a 4MBit SRAM (AS6C4008) for the framebuffer. 19 of the 34 GPIOs on the xmega are dedicated to the address lines. The camera, xmega, and sram are all connected to an 8 bit parallel bus.
Because I wanted to do things in software where possible, the main issue initially was avoiding bus contention, since the camera has the unusual property (at least to me) of being low impedance (LoZ) on start-up. This meant that the first thing to do after pin setup was to set up I2C to tell the camera to go HiZ. After setup, the xmega waits for a shoot event. More on that in a sec…
The xmega acts as the TWI bus master when talking to the camera, but to be useful to other devices, it needs to act as the slave. I also wanted to be able to hook up multiple cameras to one TWI bus, but all the camera chips use the same id, so this was a way around that also. So the xmega is configured as a TWI slave during idle (which is most of the time). It’s only a master when talking to the camera.
So now back to the shoot event. A shoot event occurs when either the shoot switch is pressed, or a TWI message is received from the host microcontroller (an Arduino, Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone whatever). Once it gets the message, it switches to an I2C master and starts communicating with the camera. I’ll try and use I2C when talking about the communication between camera and xmega, and TWI when talking about communication between xmega and host (also, the I2C uses Peter Fleury’s software implementation, and TWI uses AVR hardware).
When a shoot event occurs, the xmega does some set up, and then puts itself to sleep waiting for an interrupt. The typical way to handle the 3 signals coming from the camera (VD, HD, DCLK) on fast hardware is to handle each DCLK as a separate interrupt. However, low speed micros like the AVRs can’t do this obviously. I even had trouble doing the thing Justin Shumaker described, which is to handle HD only, and time it properly.
Instead, I ended up basically getting one interrupt for the whole image, triggered by VD, and very carefully timing the the entire assembly routine so that the inner loop is basically just incrementing an address. It turns out you can do this in 8 clock cycles per DCLK, which is great because that allows the camera to be driven at 16Mhz, which is well above the minimum in the data sheet. So the fire hose of data being spewed out of the 8230 is timed exactly with the software address increment so that the sram fills up until the camera is finished.
It’s actually possible to do all of this with regular AVRs, assuming they have enough data pins. I had this going with an 8535 early on, but since that AVR was running at 16Mhz the motion blur from the pictures was pretty bad (and I was driving the camera below the minimum clock speed anyway). It worked fine though for static images.
One thing I did notice that drove me nuts was that at 160x120 and 320x240 there’s this weird blue line bug at the bottom, but I’ve seen that in other people’s images also that use completely different approaches, so I figured it was likely that was just some weird camera bug. It’s just a single scan line, and doesn’t happen at 640x480. Does anyone else have any info on that? You can actually set a register to clear it up (0x22 0x28 I think) but then it adversely affects the image in other ways.
If you want to look at the design files or the source code or the PC viewing software, all of that is available for free at hacromatic.com. Disclaimer: it’s a commercial product, but if you just want the data files for everything they’re at the bottom of the page.
If anyone knows more about that blue line bug I’d love to hear from you!
Hi all. Can anybody advise this camera for a DiY project? I am looking for a video capture system for my small DIY video surveillance system. It seems like TCM8240MD suits the best. But after reading this huge thread I’m not so sure any more… Working with this camera looks tricky. And it requires a high speed interface for data capture and a lot of memory for frame buffer which is quite expensive. USART cameras are at least 3 times more expencive and don’t solve memory problem as well. Surfing web I run into other solution http://chip-solutions.org/en/portfolio/dozor Have anybody tried it? This device seems to be the best choice for me, but there is no price nor information about how can i buy it 
Does anybody know something about this Dozor device?
nice, ya was gonna mention to check out the ext_clock. I had a problem with my duty cycle before, so clock wasn’t werking.
I have got the TCM8230MD working with a pic32 using DMA and PMP, so zero cpu time us spent to get an image to RAM.
A 128x96 fitts in ram.
http://elektronikforumet.com/forum/view … =3&t=60147
It is in swedish thou, you also need an account to see the pictures.
Who wants a socket for the TCM8230 camera? We just got some in stock for a product we are working on that uses this camera and had to order more than we needed. It’s far easier to solder and is oven/frying pan safe.
http://www.wickedmindselectronics.com/i … kettop.jpghttp://www.wickedmindselectronics.com/i … bottom.jpghttp://www.wickedmindselectronics.com/i … cketed.jpg
I might need some of these, how can I get in touch?
We will be adding a link to our website to purchase the excess sockets in the next few days.
Just finished assembling the first vision wing for Papilio using TCM8230. Doesn’t that socket look great! Was sooooo nice being able to frying pan the thing instead of hand soldering the camera.
