Idea: Ti Camera

[dabombjr2000]

I had a cool idea the other day, a camera for the ti calculator!
There would be two parts to it, a hardware and a software part, but here's my ideas so far:
Hardware:
Just case with lense, and brightness buttons
(wether or not a pxl is blk or white)
Software:
Shows pic
if clear is pressed, quit
if enter is pressed, prompt "save? [y/n]"
If n, back
else, prompt for name, and save to an asm program

Also, the program can either draw the pic to the graphscreen, or draw it in grayscale until enter is pressed.
That's all I can think of anything else to add right now, but any suggestions would be nice!
Jason Rush
(aka dabombjr2000)

[Ray Kremer]

Odd how the Game Boy camera never really caught on, but cell phone cameras are presumably quite popular.

[leofox]

that's because cell phone camera's have color, and people usually have their cell phone's with them. It would be quite stupid if you see a celebrity in the street or something like that if you pulled out your Gameboy with camera (who carries that with him) but if you pull out your cellphone it looks normal.

i think a ti-camera is kind of a lame idea, because the ti calcs have no color. You can only get some form of greyscale.

BTW, for what calculator is this? A camera for the 89-Ti sounds better than one for teh 83.

[DarkerLine]

You could still STORE the color picture to later transmit to computer, even if you can't VIEW it on a calculator.

[DigiTan]

I like the idea of a TI-89 camera, you can really get some impressive resolution on those--I don't know how well they handle greyscale, but I'd imagine it's just as good at that too. Gameboy Camera wouldn't be a bad start; I'm told they're not as complicated to work with as they seem (its internal software does most of the work for you). There's still alot of those out on the market, but only a few sites have hard details on them. Someone once did a GBC bot project a few years back, so it's definatly possible. But who knows, maybe this will give birth to a new calculator film industry...


[GBC in time lapse]

[dabombjr2000]

I have ti-83+'s but you would only have to port the software half to the other calculators.

Also, think about if someone had a cool idea for a graphic on a program, wouldn't it be nice to just take a picture of a sketch, or a printed picture and only have to fix up a few of the pixels and you have a completed picture in only about three minutes.

There could also be an option to choose between black and white, or grayscale.

-----

Digitan, most of the work would be done on the calculator on here too.

ray kremer, this is more for a challenge and a learning experience.

[alexrudd]

Where could you get a camera that simple? I mean it's what, 1/200000th of a megapixel? unless you were planning on making one.... In that case, good luck

Maybe you could also adjust the contrast, so you can fix blocky images?

[DigiTan]

Well, it's closer to like 1/64th megapixel, but that works pretty will TI screens, which are pretty close to that size anyway. Gameboy Cam uses a CMOS "artificial retena" (AR) and handles mostly all of the image processing for you. All you'd have to do is interface to its 9 AR pins and "dump" the image into an assembly program. All your calc program would have to do is set up the camera's control registers and provide a clock (there's a little more to it than that, but that's the main role).

For contrast, you can use the cam's 8 control registers to increase/decrease the exposure. They used to go for $50 but I see one on ebay going for six--so overall, I'd say it's the best option.

[alexrudd]

[leofox]

a megapixel is 1 million pixels, which is something like a resolution of 1000x1000 pixels.

the 83+ screen is 94x64 pixels = 6144 pixels = 0.006144 megapixel = 1/162.760416666666666666666666666667 megapixel

[Arcane Wizard]

96*64

[leofox]

oops typo...

but the calculations are for 96x64 anyway.

[DigiTan]

I'm talking GB cam resolution, not TI-83+ resolution. The hardware mod sites describe it as having a 128 * 128 array. I'm not going to go through the math again, but if you take this into account you'll get 1/64 a megapixel. This is pretty significant because you can can dump most of this image to a TI screen without having to shrink the image like you would with a high-resolution image. Naturally, the GBC image will be a little larger than a TI-83+ screen which is why I'm more enthusiastic about a TI-89-based design. But TI-83+ will work almost as well if you're willing to work around the limits.

Seattle Robotics goes into pretty deep detail on the GBC in one of their bot projects bot projects. A few shutterbugs like lunacy8 have some nice GBC-only image galleries too.

[dabombjr2000]

Can anyone help me to design how to modify the gb cam, and write the asm software?

P.S. In theory, the camera could be connected to any of the ti calculators, you would just need to port the software to the other calculators.

[DigiTan]

I guess I could help out -- as far as advice goes anyway. Digital imaging to pretty new territory for me but it's a really interesting project idea.

Well I guess the first step is to choose a microcontroller for the camera. TI only gives you 2 link lines to work with, and the camera uses 7 I/O pins according to Seattle, so you'll probably need a controller like Basic Stamp, PIC, 8052, AVR, or even an intel. You might be able to pull it off without a ucontroller, but that can get very ugly very fast.

[dabombjr2000]

Well, it's pretty new territory for me too, but it's a project to see if it can be done, and to be a great learning experience.

ps, does anyone else want to help, because that would be great!

[DigiTan]

So did you decide on a controller yet? Alot of schools and bot groups have 'em if you need one.

[dabombjr2000]

I don't know what type of controller should be used, but it should probably be cheapest one that works good, or is the easiest to program.

[DigiTan]

I'll maybe go with PIC. It's cheaper than most of the other varieties and people say it's easier to program. PIC16F84 seems to be a pretty standard series (retails around $6).

[dabombjr2000]

That sounds like a plan, where can I buy some of these, and learn how to program them?