Arducam Teases Raspberry Pi Pico Camera Support

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has taken the microcontroller community by storm with the Raspberry Pi Pico and its RP2040 chip. The dual-core processor in a small form factor opens up new applications that, in the past, would have required larger boards. One exciting example to see is Arducam teasing that their Mini 2MP Arducam camera now supports the $4 board.

"We did it, again! The good o’ Arducam Mini SPI camera you all love can now run on the Raspberry Pi Pico!"

Arducam 2MP Plus is a two-megapixel still camera with an SPI-interface. Its CMOS sensor is an OV2640 with an active pixel area of 1600x1200 and support for multiple formats, including JPEG compression. As the module's name implies, Arducam originally intended it for Arduino boards like the Uno or Mega 2560. They support a wide range of boards, including the new Pi Pico.

The maker, Arducam, has started software support for the RP2040 found in the Raspberry Pi Pico. Their intent to push the Arducam 2MP Plus into machine vision applications with support for frameworks or libraries like tinyML, MicroPython, and TensorFlow Lite.

With the extra processing power of the RP2040, relative to 8-bit processors in a similar form factor, Arduino expects to support multiple-cameras or even camera clusters. The initial firmware release performance is only four frames-per-second, but improvements are likely to happen with future library updates.

Keep up-to-date with Arducam 2MP Plus announcements on the product's page. For anyone with the camera module and Pi Pico, there is code on the Arducam GitHub repository available now!