Arducam Mini Module Camera Shield with OV2640 2 Megapixels Lens Compatible with Arduino UNO Mega2560 Board and Raspberry Pi Pico

I purchased 16 Arducams from Amazon and 30 more from Arducam directly for a machine vision project of mine. The Arducam is an insightful product that fully standardizes the interface to digital cameras on the I2C and SPI busses such that its users can concentrate on what to do with the images they get instead of how to get those images. Manufacturing quality is high, all of the cameras I received were fully operational. The organization backing the Arducam is active on GitHub, providing both reference software implementations and support for their users.The Arducam is straightforward enough that it can be easily used with an Arduino, however this simple interface means that the Arducam is equally easily integrated with other single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi and the Beaglebone black. It isn’t just a camera for the Arduino, it’s a camera that because it can be easily interfaced to an Arduino, can be easily interfaced to any single board computer, either directly, or through an Arduino if needed for a larger system without exposed SPI/I2C busses. In short, the Arducam brings a plug and play solution to digital cameras at the hardware level.If you want to be able to construct software application that can easily talk to a wide range of cameras without modification, if you need image acquisition to be a straightforward process and not a custom engineering nightmare, this is the solution you want. I believe that as this ‘platform’ evolves, we’ll see an increasing rich set of cameras fronted by the Arducam chip and a steady evolution in the features and capabilities of the Arducam chip itself.In my own application the Arducam has let me integrate a large number of cameras without being buried underneath the details of the implementation, which leaves me free to concentrate on the hard problems, such as building and training the TensorFlow models that consume these images. For that reason alone, I strongly recommend these devices for anyone looking to incorporate digital cameras into their work. The Arducam itself is a unique product, however its greatest value is that it turns the cameras themselves into a commodity, just another part of the project instead of the axle you get wrapped around.

This works great! I was able to easily find sample code online and got the camera up and running in a few minutes (I'm using an ESP8266). The image quality is pretty good for such a small camera too. The focus is adjustable and the image is clear and the colors accurate. The form factor of the board made it a little difficult to mount in my project box but I did manage to make it work. If you're looking for a camera for your IoT projects, this is the one for you.

We have integrated the Arducam into our product the ImOkBox and have obtained fantastic results.The ArduCAM Mini lives in two worlds and excels in each.In the Arduino world, it is simply a matter a plugging the device into the header and loading the very well written and commented Sketch.(Sketch is the term for an Arduino programming project.) With one of the provided Sketches you can step through the different camera sensor resolutions and capture images to the SD card. The Sketch sends status information through the UART console. The image quality is amazing. This is a high quality image sensor with a great lens.The other world in which the ArduCAM Mini hits the mark is in commercial products. The genius in the ArduCAM design is that they have abstracted away all the complexity of the image sensor data transfer using their FPGA while keeping direct I2C register access to the sensor. Once the I2C registers have been loaded with the suggested settings, a two character command through the SPI port allows you to capture an image then transfer it at your leisure through the SPI. Using the example Sketches and the excellent documentation .PDFs we were able to start "talking" to the sensor from a non-Arduino platform during the first development session.ArduCAM supplies all the suggested I2C register settings for the sensor for various resolutions. So far I have not needed to tweak a single one but if I needed to, it would just be a simple I2C write.Though a previous reviewer is correct that the ArduCAM mini is a little complex for the Raspberry Pi (Note: ArduCAM makes a superb camera just for the Raspberry Pi) the tradeoff for the "complexity" is that if you are comfortable with working with SPI and I2C on a microcontroller, your 8 bit or 32 bit device can now implement crystal clear still photography with just a few SPI and I2C commands.If we'd tried to implement a direct camera sensor interface on 32 bit ARM silicon, we would be months away from a prototype. Instead, today, using the ArduCAM Mini and less than a hundred lines of C we're uploading 1024 x 768 images to our Twitter API application (@imokbox_dovey) every minute of every day using a $2.50 Freescale microcontroller.If you are comfortable with I2C and SPI communication, or you are willing to put in the effort to learn, this camera delivers everything you could ask for in a still camera. The support team is very responsive, the documentation is clear and provides examples and the working code in their Git Hub repository is professional and well commented.

Not very impressed with the picture quality, and this model apparently doesn't let you read raw RGB data. JPEG only.Example source code is bloated, poorly commented and hard to follow. I figured it out, but it took longer than it should have.Ended up using this on an ESP32 as a WiFi IP camera. It connected to Blue Iris and works reliably.

I was hoping to make this work on a Raspberry Pi or a Pico, but found the documentation to be very confusing and ambiguous. I've been working with RP devices for many years, and I couldn't figure this out. Getting this to work is like giving birth to a flaming porcupine. Returning the device.

bought to use with a nucleo board. works great if you're using the arduino library and compile with the arduino ide, but using it for anything else is a chore - documentation is heavily lacking and the support is near non-existent for non-arduino applications.