CamTest

A frame-capture demo with Pi Pico, OV5640 camera, and CircuitPython.

In its current form, this:

1. Captures a 240x240 px grayscale frame every 2 seconds

2. Converts the 8-bit pixel data to 1-bit with a >> 7

3. Prints pixels to the serial console with Unicode Block Element characters

Hardware

• Adafruit Proto Under Plate PiCowBell for Pico (product page)

• Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 (product page, docs)

• Stacking Headers for Raspberry Pi Pico - 2 x 20 Pin (product page)

• Adafruit PiCowbell Camera Breakout, 72° lens (learn guide, product page)

Getting Started

To begin, solder the headers, assemble the stack of boards, install CircuitPython, then copy the project bundle code to your CIRCUITPY drive. Once that's all done, code.py will begin capturing camera frames and printing them to the serial console. If you want to keep a frame, press the shutter button to stop the camera. To restart the camera, type Ctrl-C then Ctrl-D in your serial terminal emulator.

The output looks like this, if you make your terminal's font size really small:

Try the Project Bundle

This repo uses the GitHub Actions workflow from cookiecutter-playground-bundle to build a project bundle zip archive for each tagged release. If you want to try the code:

1. Go to the page for the latest release.

2. Download the zip file attached to the release page. It should be named something similar to camtest-27df0c3.zip.

3. Expand the zip file (resulting folder should be named camtest).

4. Copy the contents of the 'camtest/CircuitPython 9.x' folder to your CIRCUITPY drive (assuming your board is running CircuitPython 9.x).