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[entropi]

I picked up a netduino for my brother-in-law for Christmas and couldn't resist getting one myself. Developer by day, I haven't touched hardware since a single digital logic design class in college far too long ago...

One project idea I've been thinking about involves manipulating a webcam video feed. I get that the netduino doesn't have the kind of specs needed to handle the video itself. Instead, I was thinking of grabbing a couple cmos cameras from somewhere like sparkfun and then use the netduino to control the data flow of which one feeds into a dedicated USB controller that could handle the video-to-pc heavy lifting.

I've found references to a few dedicated ICs out there (like these) that can take the camera input and show up as a UVC USB device to avoid any extra driver install needs, but I haven't found any source for buying them (and certainly nothing affordable and ideally on a breakout board that I could play with), plus no idea of the price.

Any ideas? Is there a more general purpose MCU or other approach out there that could maybe handle this kind of thing? These are just random thoughts right now..I'm basically looking for the most straightforward way to get a video feed to show up as a webcam on a pc, with that piece not needing to be too directly tied to the netduino.

[Roel]

Hi entropi,

I am in the same phase as you are and looking for options to handle video with .NETMF.

I learned this so far:

• Passing video will be no problem (as I heard)
• Encoding will be the problem
• You need WiFi for datatransfer
• ZigBee bandwidth is to small

It is possible to display video with a chipworkx from GHI. Analog devices has a solution as you like it with a blackfin processor. But kind of expensive.

I think we should take a look at passing the video by the NetDuino. So create a memorystream from the input to a networkstream without encoding. So it should be already digital. Sprakfun has a serial camera (not video), this will make things easy.

Roel