Streaming camera video from an Arduino Giga

A close friend has been trying to get a video feed from an Arduino so he can make astronomical observations from a gizmo he has made that will sit in the garden and observe the video in the house over USB.

We tried various methods including using the Processing app but did not have any success. The release of the Arduino Giga with Display Shield and onboard plug in camera (OV7675) has changed things. Using these integrated modules with the OpenMV application produces good quality video over the USB connection. An image of the Giga from the Arduino website is shown below.

There is a write up on using OpenMV on the Arduino forum. This is easy to follow and works very well. If I understand it correctly OpenMV loads specific firmware into the Giga rather than an Arduino based code uploaded in the normal way.

There are a few minor things to watch out for. The Giga seems to like a double reset to clear out any existing code before loading the OpenMV code. Likewise when reverting the Giga back for Arduino use you must also do a double reset.

As mentioned in the article you need to load the display.py demo example code but the demos are not available for selection until OpenMV detects the board in use. Once the boards is detected you will get details on the bottom status bar.

The other minor thing that is not immediately obvious …. if the video and the histograms are not present on the right hand side of the screen you need to drag them into view using the side arrow.

Here is a screen shot showing the code on the left hand side and the video feed and histograms on the right hand side,

The Arduino Giga is a very sophisticated module and the various example sketches that are available to run on it are impressive. It will certainly stretch my ‘cut and paste’ coding….

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