Description

This camera module can be a pretty neat project addition. It was designed to be used in security systems and does two main things - it outputs NTSC video and can take snapshots of that video and transmit them over the TTL serial link. You can snap pictures at 640x480, 320x240 or 160x120 and they're pre-compressed JPEG images which makes them nice and small and easy to store on an SD card. Perfect for a data-logging, security, or photography project.

One nice thing about this particular camera is all the 'extras' that come with it. For example it has manually adjustable focus, auto-white-balance, auto-brightness and auto-contrast taken care of for you as well as motion detection built in! That means you can have it alert your project when something moved in the frame.

We also carry an enclosed weather-proof version

Using the module is pretty easy and only requires two digital pins (or a TTL serial port) - by default it transmits at 38400 baud but the baud rate can be adjusted if you need to transmit the images faster. Of course we wouldn't just leave you with a datasheet and a 'good luck', we even spent a lot of time researching the module and DSP to make a really nice Arduino library with example code that shows how to change the image size and compression quality, detect motion, control the video output stream, etc. We also have a very detailed tutorial that will help get the most use out of your camera.

Example photo 1 (outside street) & example photo 2 (inside person)

Note: We have these working great with classic Arduino UNOs (and other Atmega328-based 'duinos) but they are not yet MEGA compatible.

Tutorials

Check out our detailed tutorial on how to use this camera module with an Arduino (and in general

Fabien's Netduino + Camera tutorial

Tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System featuring this product:
	TTL Serial Camera Snap, Snap!

downloads

We have a fairly full-featured Arduino library with examples that demonstrate how to use the camera
The datasheet for the DSP processor itself (not terribly useful for the module but good for reference
PTC-08 module datasheet contains dimensional drawings
This is the DSP management tool (windows only sorry!) it allows you to tweak pretty much everything on the camera as well as test it out via a serial port
A basic python sketch that will let you snag a image over a serial port - good for testing when you cant use the DSP tool above
This is the 'protocol cheat sheet' for the sensor its a little crummy - we suggest reading our library code and porting it instead of trying to do it from scratch with this sheet