I finally got around to posting an updated version of the C328R camera library. The new version is a minor update that now adds checksums to ensure no data is corrupted when transferring JPEGs from the camera. I’ve never encountered any data corruption in the past with this camera, and thus never added the feature, but it’s definitely a welcome addition. The update is courtesy of a patch submitted by John Jarvis, as featured in his very nice geotagger project. Thanks John!
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Have you ever wanted to build your own wearable spy camera, UAV or other small, camera-enabled gizmo, gadget or device? While Arduino provides a wonderful prototyping platform for creating all sorts of DIY electronic gadgets, experimentations in physical computing, robotic artworks, and the like, it’s slim pickins’ when it comes to finding a tiny, easy-to-use digital camera to pair it up with. Fortunately, a company out of Hong Kong, COMedia Ltd., makes the C328R, a relatively small cell-phone style camera module that includes built-in JPEG image compression and UART serial communication. Couple the camera module with an Arduino and external storage (EEPROM, microSD, etc.) and you can have an instant Arduino-powered digital still image or video capture solution. That is to say, “instant,” once you have a working software driver … Fortunately for you, I’ve already done that work.
While working on a pigeon-based aerial photography solution as part of PigeonBlog for Beatriz da Costa, I wrote a library in C++ that allows the Arduino to communicate with the C328R camera over UART using the camera’s built-in communications protocol. Here’s a sample picture to prove that it works:
Sample C328R picture
The camera can take pictures in a variety of color depths (2- to 8-bit grayscale, 12- to 16-bit color, JPEG) and resolutions (80×64 to 640×480) with serial communication up to 115,200 baud. It’s fairly versatile and not terribly expensive (~$50) given the fact that it does a lot of work for you (i.e. on-board JPEG compression).
The rest of this post assumes that you have the camera and an Arduino Duemilanove (or similar) in hand. If you don’t, I suggest that you get them. You’re also going to need some type of external storage for the pictures, because the Arduino doesn’t provide any sufficient storage on-board. The sample code that follows assumes a 256KB Atmel SPI serial EEPROM or similar SPI EEPROM.
Tags: arduino, c++, camera, photography, processing