I’m working on an embedded home surveillance system. I want to interface a couple of serial-enabled JPEG capture cameras, maybe a couple of door sensors, etc. Problem is, I can’t for the life of me figure out how to interface a camera to a microcontroller. Stills, streaming video, it doesn’t matter – I can’t find any how-to documentation on this.
I understand serial communications, and most of the camera documentation I’ve found out there describes the protocol necessary to instruct the camera to send the datastream down to the uC for capture. What they don’t show is what you’re supposed to do with the data once you get it.
They show a great little video, and the datasheet describes which bytes must be sent to the camera to retrieve the image. What I need is an example or tutorial of some sort that will explain what to do with the stream of bytes that make up the image itself. How do I arrange those bytes into an image and save it as a file?
I’ve looked all over the place for a tutorial of some sort, but have come up dry. I’m not sure which processor I’ll use for this project just yet, but this question isn’t really processor-dependent. All I need is the algorithm, maybe a peek at a library, if one exists. I’ll take that process and adapt it to my hardware, I just can’t seem to find a place to get started.
Have any of you done this?
I think the details are pretty clear in page 10 inside this document:
http://www.4dsystems.com.au/downloads/micro-CAM/Docs/uCAM-DS-rev4.pdf
First, one package is between 64 to 512 bytes – flexibly defined by the programmer. Image size is the actual JPEG image itself….nothing more or less….just pure JPEG image. So the equation to calculate the number of package based on image_size / package_size is given in page 10.
Next, is that (package_size – 6) is to be consistently used everywhere, because 6 bytes are used up for non-data purpose, so (package_size – 6) will be just the data – but u have to reassemble it yourself.
To assemble the data from the package, u have to strip the 4 byte header + 2 byte trailer and concatenate all these from all the package sequentially one after another.
Other facts:
a. “Set Package Size” command must be sent from host to CAM – before “SNAPSHOT” command, which capture the image from the camera into the CAM memory buffer.
b. Next is to send “SNAPSHOT” command to capture the image into memory buffer.
c. Last is to send “GET PICTURE” command (only one time, but data will come back multiple times – see diagram in page 15) to extract out all the images….and it will come back in the form of “package” as we have defined the size earlier in “set package size”. Since u have calculate the formula u will know when to stop asking for the next package. And there is a verification byte – u have to used that to make sure data is correct.