Driving an adafruit VC0706 TTL Serial JPEG Camera with a Netduino @ Fabien’s Bit Bucket.

 Earlier this month, AdaFruit released a nice little TTL camera, perfect for security and remote monitoring applications. The camera supports three resolutions (640×480, 320×240 and 160×120), has a built-in motion detection circuit and can output an NTSC signal, all in a fairly compact form factor. The communication with the camera is done over a TTL UART @ up to 115200 bauds…

As I’m working on a security-related project involving the Netduino, it was the perfect opportunity to put this camera to the test, starting with writing a C# driver. While interfacing with the camera over the TTL UART of the Netduino is straight forward, the datasheet describing the protocol and commands required to control the camera functions is painfully sketchy and sometime inaccurate. In some instances, some camera functions such as OSD (text overlay) are not supported in the firmware even though the datasheet documents them or only behave properly if called in a particular sequence, which of course, is not documented…

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