OpenMV Update: 25FPS Face Detection, USB Support and More

So I've been working on OpenMV for the past week and this is what I have so far: USB Support: The camera now supports USB OTG full speed, I've also written a small userspace tool with libusb/SDL to interface with the camera and view the frame buffer, this makes it really easy to debug the image processing code, and it also lets you change the sensor's registers while watching the results in realtime. I've mentioned...

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Using The CCM Memory on the STM32

The STM32 series have non-contiguous memories divided into blocks, for example the STM32F4, has 2 (contiguous) blocks of SRAM connected to the bus matrix with different interconnects, and a Core Coupled Memory (CCM) block which is connected directly to the core. This tight coupling of the CCM memory to the core, leads to zero wait states, in other words, the core has exclusive access to...

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STM32F4xx Libraries

I wrote a tutorial before on how to setup a toolchain and build the STM32F4xx standard peripheral drivers into one convenient library, since then, a few people have asked me about the library, so to make life easier, I downloaded the latest StdPeriph/CMSIS, in addition to a few other libraries that I might need later, and shared everything in one repository, which currently has the following libraries: Cortex-M...

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FT231X Breakout

This is a breakout board for FTDI's latest USB-to-Serial bridge, the FT231X. This one comes in a smaller package (SSOP20) and it's cheaper than its predecessor the FT232R/L, it also offers a charging detection feature, which I'm not really interested in, but anyway see this post for more details. I've seen a couple of good breakout boards out there, but this one has a few advantages over the others,  it has a solder...

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Color Tracking With OpenMV

So I finally had some free time to work on OpenMV, for those of you who haven't been following this project, OpenMV is an open-source tiny machine vision module based on an STM32F4 ARM Cortex-M4 micro and an OV9650 sensor. I started this project mainly because I find the existing cameras are either too limited for their price or too expensive if they do some image processing, so one of my main goals was to make...

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OpenMV Update

Another quick update on my project OpenMV. I've finally managed to get the sensor working in QQVGA/RGB565 mode: I'm using the discovery board as a debugger and a smart LCD to display the frames via USART. I've also implemented a simple color tracking algorithm, as a proof of concept: I'm currently cleaning up the code, and I will share it with the schematics next time.. Thanks for all your support...

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OpenMV Camera Module

This a quick update on my camera project (OpenMV)... I've finally received the long overdue PCBs today and assembled one: I haven't written any code yet, but I've managed to get it into DFU mode and upload a blinky, it seems to be working fine so far, no smoke :) I will post another update or a video as soon as I get something cool running. ...

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NHD-C12832 Breakout

This is a breakout board for NewHaven's NHD-C12832 graphic display, a 128 x 32 pixels display with an SPI interface. I like this display mainly because it's cheap (about $11) I think it was the cheapest one I could find with this resolution, and it also looks great. However, it has an unusual package (tight pitch pins and four holes, two for the backlight and two for the screen) so I had to spend some time working...

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In Search of a Better Serial Camera Module

So I've been looking everywhere for a cheap serial camera to use in my projects, preferably with some basic image processing, like object or motion detection etc.. The cheapest one I could find that barely meets my needs is sold on adafruit for $35, it has a 640x480 pixels sensor and can do some motion detection but nothing more. Then there is the more expensive modules which cost around $40 that do nothing at...

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Running OLinuXino-MAXI on Battery

Finally I've had some time to play with my new Olimex iMX233-OLinuXino-MAXI board, the board is similar to the Raspberry pi, almost the same size and cost, however, this one has an ARM iMX233 running at 454Mhz, less RAM and no GPU. I played with the board for a while then I decided to test it using batteries, I found out that the USB/Ethernet physical is disabled when running on batteries ! After some digging around in...

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