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 all and finally there's the CMUcam, which has some really nice features, but way too big and expensive (costs $100) for my needs...

So I decided to make my own serial camera, keeping in mind the basic set of features that I want:

• Low cost
• Small form
• Basic image processing
• Open source (duh!)

First, I had to choose an image sensor to use, I was inclined to use the TCM8230MD, which I'm familiar with, however, the sensor alone costs $10 and I can't seem to find it any where else other than sparkfun. So, I've decided to try the Omnivision sensors, the cheapest one I could find is the OV9650 (1280x1024 pixels) sold on ebay for $2... The nice thing about this sensors is that it connects to the board with an FPC cable (that flexible yellow cable), which means it's possible to replace it later with another one (assuming it has the same pinout) and it also has a higher resolution than the TCM8230MD. The downside with this particular sensor is that it doesn't have JPEG compression, but I could live with RGB/RAW output, after all I plan to use it mainly for image processing, or I could try to implement the JPEG compression on the micro.

Moving on to the microcontroller, a powerful micro is needed to interface with this sensor, preferably with a DCMI hardware interface, I implemented a DCMI before in software with an LPC1768/TCM8230MD and it could barely keep up, so I decided to go with something faster. 

Fortunately, I had a couple of STM32F4 micros laying around, which seemed perfect for the job since it  runs at 168MHz, has a hardware DCMI (should make it a lot easier to interface the camera) and as an added bonus, it has a floating point unit and vector processing (SIMD), making it perfect for image processing... Unfortunately, the DCMI only comes with the LQFP-100 package, so I couldn't use a smaller one. 

I started working on the PCB, first, I made a footprint for the sensor and its connector, which seems to fit nicely:

And then I moved to the layout, however, shortly after that, I realized that it's impossible to fit the sensor and micro (let alone the debugging header and interface) on a 2 layer PCB, which is what I had in mind initially to reduce the costs. So a 4 layer PCB seemed inevitable If I wanted to make it as small as possible, there's also some inherit benefits to the extra layers such as better power planes and decoupling, easier routing etc... Anyway, the first version of the PCB (25x37mm) costs around $5

The board has a triple output LDO 3.3v/2.5v/1.5v (the one I had at hand came in a QFN package) and a micro USB connector, which can be used to power the board or update the firmware with DFU. The  SWD pins are broken out for debugging (I'm currently working on a JTAG debugger too) I also throw in an RGB led (not sure if it's too close to the sensor to be visible or not)

The STM32F4 micro costs $11.79 per one, and $7.31 per 500, this adds up to around $20 for one piece and could go as low as $15 for 500 pieces,  it's much higher than I expected, but It should make up for it with some cool image processing, and still almost $15 cheaper than the adafruit camera :)

I still haven't received the PCBs yet, will post an update when I do and when I get it working I will release all the sources. I'm also giving away one for free, leave a comment if you're interested :)