Embedded Lab

Ibrahim Kamal from IKALOGIC informed me about his latest article on the use of CMOS camera for sensing applications posted on his website. It’s true that interfacing a CMOS camera with 8-bit microcontrollers has not been very common. There’s a stereotype that much faster and powerful microcontrollers are required to process the output of a CMOS camera, which may not always be true, as illustrated by Ibrahim Kamam. In fact, it all depends on the type of application you choose with a CMOS camera.

CMOS camera can replace an array of photo sensors

The article discusses about the possibility of using a CMOS camera for sensing applications by reducing the image resolution and getting rid of the color information. The downgraded image requires lesser computation, and therefore, is feasible to process using a simple 8-bit microcontroller. With this arrangement one CMOS camera could replace an array of conventional light sensors (made of LEDs and photodiodes) that are used in many embedded applications including robotics. A quick illustration on how to interface the TCM8230MD CMOS camera (available from SparkFun) to an AVR XMEGA processor has also been discussed in the article.