PICers,
I'm *still* thinking about that rf-cam project - ie a digital imaging
sensor of some sort hooked up via an RS232 to a radio modem. The idea
being to send images thru the aether. Want to use narrow band UHF data
telemetry, not a video signal.

It don't really look do-able using a PIC with a USB cam, the reasons
for which we kicked round earlier.

OK, there are lots of image sensing chips out there. Kodak's KAC0311
series & Motorola's MCM20014 & MCM20027 chips, which use Kodak's
technology so they're basically the same. National has one too.

Turns out the heart of their sytem isn't the image sensor itself but
the co-processor. There's one called "Clarity 2". It has 208 (!!) pins
and works at 48MHz. It uses an IBM ASIC, whatever that is, and the
development kit for the ARM processor inside it costs - wait for it -
USD15,000!! Even the low end, like a dev board + lenses + software etc
from eg. National, is around USD2500. Obviously we're not talking
hobbyists' budgets here  :(

And it sure don't look as if the sensor itself would be directly
hackable by anything less than a Clarity device, never mind a PIC :(

On the other hand, Clarity 2 dumps the image from the sensor into an
SDRAM & NVRAM which probably would be accessible by a high level PIC,
say an f877. So from that angle maybe the thing would be do-able?

So, uh, I'm looking for ideas, guys? Say you want to capture a digital
image and send it thru a modem - thru an RS232 interface in this case
cuz that's what the ones I can get use.

How would you go about it? Heh, are we back to hacking old digital
cameras? Gotta be some more satifactory way - how do the astronomers
do it with their CCD thingys for example?

Thanx for ideas - Ian.



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