gpy camera?

[kjm]

In my rpi days if I needed to grab the occasional still frame from a remote site it was as simple as plugging in a usb web cam, and uploading a 640x480 pic over 4G was no problem.

Solutions for the gpy seem a bit scarce? https://forum.pycom.io/topic/5650/connecting-camera-to-fipy-new-findings-of-non-ee has opted for an idea that uses 2 different buses but that looks complicated. Is there an easy way to get a usb cam connected to a gpy via a usb-to-uart adapter or is the gpy uart not fast enough?

[jcaron]

@kjm The most common camera for ESP32 projects and other MCUs seems to be the OV2640 mentioned in the link above. Note that the "raw" camera seems to have a pretty nasty interface, you probably want the Arducam SPI or some equivalent, which has SPI and I2C interfaces.

There's a micropython driver for it, though it was targeted at the ESP8266 Arduino boards. I don't think it should be very difficult to adapt to a Pycom board. There's a long discussion here and it seems someone managed to get it to run on a GPy.

Once you get things sorted it's just as simple as:

import ov2640
cam = ov2640.ov2640()
nbytes = cam.capture_to_file("/image.jpg")

From what I understand performance is pretty bad, but for a single picture it should work out OK I suppose.

[crumble]

@kjm
No. I don't know if there is a standard for simple image download. Some serial cameras have features for private robotics or industrial usage. So they can detect/trace objects or QR codes and tell you their special data. So I guess you have to implement the download by your own.

The adafruit and Pixy2 CMUCam5 have python examples. May be a start for you.

[kjm]

Do you know of a micropython lib that can tickle a serial webcam to regurgitate an image? I was hoping for something as easy as os.system('fswebcam -r 640x480 -S10 image.jpg') on the pi?

[crumble]

You can try to use an rs232 camera module.