AvrSerialCamera

This is a sideways picture of my front door. notice the band of black at the top - this is the rest of the image which was ignored. This is the first picture I took with a C3088 camera controlled by atmega32 which generates an 8-bit BMP and sends it out via RS232. A python script controls the camera thru the serial command interface and stores the resulting image to disk.

This is the second picture (ok there were a few in between but not worth keeping). I've fixed the downloader to grab the whole image and will now start working on color and full VGA res if this camera indeed supports it.

intro

This project grew out of the BalloonSatellite because the desire was to be able to download images from the balloon remotely. After some thinking it became clear that there are a lot of uses for a wireless really remote camera (miles away). This is a low res camera but popular with lots of example code. They are a bit hard to find but I eventually tracked one down.

this camera is really slow without a superfast proc or some RAM attached. I don't think it takes pictures fast enough for use with a balloon given only the camera and an AVR

base

The code base was written by Iñaki Navarro Oiza. The report and code have all that you need to get this camera running in BW BMP mode. I am using my avronics controller and a squid cable to connect to the C3088. I needed to add 2.2K pull up resistors to SCL and SDA and make a few tiny changes in the code to configure the UART to work with my setup (at the moment I max out at 19200 baud due to a DS275 RS232 tranceiver) but other than that it worked out of the box. Great project!

additions

I am building off of the code base to suit my needs. It is nice to have a preformatted BMP but I'd really like to get full color and smaller image sizes.

color

I have added a color photo command which dumps the raw YUV data over the serial line. There is no format really (YUYVYUYV...) but thats ok because on the recieving end is a program written in python that recieves the raw data and generates a "RGB" raw file that is converted it to a standard type (jpeg, and png). Image manipulation is handled by the python image library and serial is handled by the python serial library.

remote operation

wireless capability is added through any number of radios out there. I would like to test with the MaxStream ZigBee radio which claims to have a range of 1 mile. I need to swap out a few parts to get the baudrate up to 115.2kbaud or better. 19.2kbaud is very slow and effects the image considerably if anything is moving.

-- ChristopherPepe - 27 Jan 2007