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ArduCAM Demos Raspberry Pi Pico Video Streaming and Person Detection
The $4 Raspberry Pi Pico just keeps on giving! The latest project as reported by Hackaday sees the team behind the popular ArduCAM create a library enabling the Raspberry Pi Pico to work with an SPI camera for video streaming and person detection.
As you have probably guessed, ArduCAM is the name for a range of cameras compatible with Arduino and now the Raspberry Pi Pico. In the demo video we can see the team using an ArduCAM 2MP Plus, a camera with an OV2640 2MP image sensor which has built in support for JPEG. ArduCAM does most of the heavy lifting, reducing the workload of the Raspberry Pi Pico.
A host application, shown running on a Windows 10 computer appears to show that the continuous streaming video demo runs at 320 x 240 and connects over a USB serial port via a USB to TTL adaptor such as the CH340 or CP2102. The demo is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux devices including the Raspberry Pi.
The ArduCAM team have provided a Github repository with full instructions on how to recreate two demo applications, a simple video streaming test, and a demo with basic person detection. If you haven't got the time, or just want to try out the demos for yourself, then ArduCAM also provide the demos as UF2 files, which can be flashed to the Raspberry Pi Pico in seconds. Right now the demos are built in C, but we spotted that ArduCAM are working on a port to MicroPython.
Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom's Hardware. He is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training program "Picademy".
