The PCB arrived 3 weeks ago, and finally, the time was found what should have been tried out long time ago.
Here’s the result. The tiny mobile type camera is able to deliver JPEGs from the sensor, that is, we can run our motion JPEG server on the popular SRV1 robot from http://www.surveyor.com.
The videos can just be watched in a browser or with mplayer. Still tweaking frame rates and PLL…
The board supports another VGA global shutter sensor with cheap webcam optics, as you can see from the unpopulated footprint. If things work as expected in theory, both sensors can be populated and selected via GPIOs, so they can be switched at runtime. The bigger problem is, to make the uClinux framework (which is about to be ported to the SRV1) acknowledge the dual head device. The current driver model does not really support that, so all sensor property control is happening in user space via the netpp (network property protocol) framework.
Update: Sadly, the brain behind the SRV1 and development partner Howard Gordon has suddenly passed away: https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/article39130170.html
It was great to work with you. You will be missed.
Therefore, further development on this has currently come to a halt. The future SRV1 development is maintained by Timothy Jump at https://engineering3.org