Embedded Lab

Capsule endoscopy lets doctors to see inside of your small intestine, an area that isn’t easily reachable with traditional endoscopy procedures. It involves a tiny wireless capsule camera that the patient needs to swallow. The camera has its own light source and takes pictures of the small intestine as it passes through. The pictures are transmitted wirelessly to a small recording device next to the patient. Such cameras are very costly and built with the technologies that are proprietary and inaccessible to makers. Ryan Bailey has undertaken to make an open capsule camera usable for medical applications as well as adaptable to be used in other space-constrained environments.

Tiny capsule camera

Ryan’s top-level design includes an OV2640 RGB camera module with 4 white LEDs to provide flash light during imaging. The entire system is powered by a single 1.55V 75mAH silver-oxide button cell battery along with a boost converter to generate 2.8V supply required for the camera and other electronics. The main electronics board consists of the STM32F411CE ARM Cortex M4 processor, memory for storing images, and the nRF24L01+ RF transceiver chip. The ARM processor implements the 8-bit parallel video interface to the camera and also provides a 6-24MHz reference clock required by the image sensor. All electronics will be enclosed in a sealed capsule made of a bio-compatible material with the front face of the camera covered by a clear cap.