Interfacing mass-produced camera chips

[741]

I had an enquiry about producing a customised cycling/action camera. I'd guessing '720p', not sure.

I wonder how to source/second-source the basic camera 'chips' and how to interface, also typical pricing and what standards the various chips might have in common.

It needs to loop-record to SD card. I've done a little basic low-speed SD card stuff + FAT once, that's all though.

Is this feasible with "PIC & 'C'" and - in an attempt to save a lot of time searching - please does anyone have some relevent pointers/links?

Thanks.
Stephen.

[Rerouter]

For interfacing, have a look at mikeselectricstuff 's youtube channel, he goes into interfacing cameras. And heavily using the DMA functions to allow handling camera datarates on the cheap.

Still a 720p sensor will take a fair bit of bandwidth depending on your desired frame rate.

[amyk]

720p is considered low resolution for the typical smartphone camera modules which you would probably be fine with, and they're pretty cheap. The interface is likely to be MIPI CSI or perhaps serial, it is doable to "stream" data into an SD card if you get all the timings lined up just right. You'd probably want to compress the output, however, and that goes easily into the realm of custom SoCs --- 1280x720 60FPS 24bpp uncompressed video takes ~160MB/s which is far beyond what the majority of SD cards can do.

[741]

Compression is a good point, I seem to recall Microchip have libraries implementing that, though it might just be JPG.

Two other routes I'm considering

• FTDI do a range of camera interface chips
• Rasperry Pi - would the 'nano' suffice?