Bitcraze Forums

I am wondering if it is feasible to add a miniature TTL camera (3 gram) to the flie.
http://www.adafruit.com/products/1386

I want to make a flie that is able to take a picture and send the image back to iPhone. I have browsed through several thread on this forum, about adding FPV to flie. They all use camera which output analog signals and then transmitted through antenna and received at the laptop side. Since the flie is connected to iPhone via BLE, which transmit digital signal, If I am going to use the same camera mentioned in those threads, I will need extra digital/analog conversion circuit. That's why I decide to pick a TTL camera as the starting point.

I have experience working with TTL camera on Arduino, but I don't know how to interface that with the flie, the STM32. Does the MCU has enough computing power to receive, store and send a JPEG through BLE? The size of the JPEG will be 640*480. If YES, would you tell me where should I get started?

Your advice and help is highly appreciated. Thank you.

This thread has been moved to the more appropriate sub-forum: Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter -> General Discussions.

Not to dig up an old thread, but I had the same idea. Theoretically this would work, because the CrazyFlie supports UART. So the idea is hook up the camera to the UART expansion port. The trick would be to communicate with the camera using a serial connection, then transmit the data to whatever commander you want using the same method that telemetry information is transmitted.

The good news is, that camera already converts the data to jpeg, so you dont have to do anything with it on the crazyflie. Just get the data, send it to the command center, and then the command center can take the JPEG information and display it to the screen using a number of different kind of libraries.

You would have to modify the crazyflie firmware to add this extra routing functionality. What I can use help with is getting more documentation about modifying the CrazyFlie firmware, accessing the UART, and details about the TTL protocol of the camera.

This is a project I am actively working on so Ill keep you posted.

EDIT: I did find the protocol specifications for the camera at http://www.adafruit.com/datasheets/VC0706protocol.pdf

EDIT 2: Looking into this further, it looks like it is not possible to do Real Time video with this camera, and you can't simulate it because it takes up to 30 seconds to get the data from the camera. If you want a camera that you can take a snap, and move on, then this works. But not good for real time video.

nice idea. I like it

A while ago we did a master thesis trying to accomplish that. You might find some interesting things in there.