$10 VGA camera on the Papilio One? How about a free PCB to try it yourself?

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Several months ago we designed a Wing for the OV7670 camera that can be found on Ebay for around $10. To our delight Voelker contributed VHDL code to interface with the very same camera! To show our appreciation for this contribution we are giving away all the Wing PCB’s that we have sitting on our desk for this camera. The Wing is designed for the 2.8V version of the camera but should work with the 3.3V camera with a little modification.

Please note that all of the free PCB’s have been sent out. We got such a great response that I will do some more give aways in the future. Please keep watching the blog to be the first to know!

Papilio user Voelker has started an excellent topic on our forum to share with us what he has come up with. He connected an ov7670 camera module that he found on ebay to the Papilio One in order to read an image from it and try to apply some treatment. Voelker’s goal was to have a cmucam like platform for teaching purpose.

“At this point I have designed a small pipeline that grab the pixels, takes the Y (luminance) component  performs a downscale of the image (640×480 -> 80×60) and send the picture on serial at 3Mbaud. Frame grabbing and sending is done at 30hz. There is no soft core involved, everything is performed using homemade modules (i2c, pixel grabbing, downscaling …) and I am only using some BRAM for configuration storing, one 80 pixel line storing for downscaling, and a 128 byte FIFO for the serial communication.”

Then he made a small JAVA application to display the picture and he’s still trying to add an edge detector to the pipeline to detect a line and build a line following robot.

This is a brilliant project and Girish made a wing design for this module and commited it to Github, the Wing was designed for a slightly different module that requires 2.8V and the pinouts are the same for the module that Voelker is using. However, you will probably have to jumper 3.3V to the pin 1 of his module, or provide the 2.8V voltage regulator.

Feel free to discuss in our forum this interesting topic and share with us your suggestions to help improve this project.

You can check out the project and the full code here, and we’ve got the original forum thread here if you’d like to read the whole thing, complete with tech specs, etc.

Thanks for sharing your work with us, Voelker