The6P4C Releases Code to Get OV2640 Camera Sensors Playing Nicely on Raspberry Pi Pico, RP2040
0BSD-licensed code lets you capture CIF-resolution 352x288 imagery and transmit them to a host machine via UART.
Pseudonymous student The6P4C has released code that allows the Raspberry Pi Pico, and by extension other development boards based around the RP2040 microcontroller, to work with an OV2640 camera sensor.
Released last week, the Raspberry Pi Pico is the first microcontroller development board from Raspberry Pi — and is powered by the RP2040, the first in-house silicon from the organization too. As a brand-new device, though, it's going to be a while before it boasts the same wealth of library support as more established rivals — but as The6P4C's work shows, there's plenty of interest in helping it catch up.
"[This is a] quick demonstration of interfacing with an OV2640 camera from the Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040)," The6P4C writes in the project's readme. "Captures images in CIF resolution (352 by 288) and sends them to a computer over the UART. Images can be captured and the camera's registers read/written from a small IPython shell."
While written for and tested on the Raspberry Pi Pico, the code should work just as well with any other RP2040-based board. We've already seen Adafruit, Arduino, Pimoroni, and SparkFun announce their own RP2040-based development boards, and more are sure to follow — thanks in no small part to the publication of a reference guide for working with the component and the release of KiCAD files for a minimum viable board, a VGA carrier, and the Raspberry Pico itself.
The source code for The6P4C's OV2640 demonstration is available on GitHub under the permissive 0BSD license.