Capturing Video With An Arduino

[Carlos Agell] sent in a tip where he captured images from an analog camera with an Arduino.

We’ve seen a few AVR/Arduino hacks that generate video, although overclocking is necessary if you want to do anything beyond a Breakout clone. [Carlos]’ hack bucks that trend and now he can capture video with an Arduino.

The project captures individual frames from NTSC video at a resolution of 128×96. Although the Arduino isn’t powerful enough for real-time capture, [Carlos] managed this by capturing only thresholds and sending them over to a computer running a program coded in LabVIEW. The PC program reassembles the images of the thresholds and produces a tiny image in 3-bit grayscale.

[Carlos] used the Video Experimenter shield which is impressive in it’s own right. The Video Experimenter is able to do object tracking and edge detection, so we’re wondering when we’ll see robots with computer vision running off an Arduino. Check out a demo of the nootropic design video experimenter shield after the break.

UPDATE: Carlos wrote a sketch in Processing that does the same thing as his LabVIEW program.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGy70XxhpMY&w=470]

10 thoughts on “Capturing Video With An Arduino

  1. @Rob
    It might.

    As it happens Sparkfun sells a camera, and JPEG trigger board who’s basically an Arduino wired to simply use that camera to collect stills and store them on a microSD card.

    And they practically admit it as such, since that’s how its programmed.

  2. Hey,
    The big difference of this solution VS the JPEG solution is that you can process the data on the Arduino when it is not compressed.

    There is no way to decode JPEG on the arduino to process the images, whereas the solution proposed is less resolution, monochrome, but let’s you take decisions based on data.

    If you want to store data on an SD card then it is better the JPEG solution, if you want to take decision based on the image info, then use the video experimenter shield.

    BTW there is no way to decode the color info with the latter solution.

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