Gameboy camera issues

I have been experimenting with a old Gameboy camera for quite some time (for use in a robot-soccer application) and still have not quite got it working. I am using a PIC 16F876 and was initially planning to simply use the onboard ADC to read the voltage from the camera and dump it to the serial port. However this process is relitively slow which I think is where the problem lies - can someone tell me if there is a maximum time the camera 'holds' the image before it must be read (i.e. before it 'fades' in it's memory)? The first 1/4 of the picture seems OK-ish but the rest just turns grey. As I mentioned, the reading process is not that quick as I currently have no external RAM to store the image in. Is this what I'm doing wrong?!

Thanks!

Angus Thomson

Hi Angus, I've been playing with a gameboy camera on PC recently. There are a number of draw backs with the camera. It has what is called a rolling reset which means that it continues to gather the picture as you scan it out. One effect of this is that if you move the camera while clocking the picture out the image will "tear" .

My experiments have been aimed at getting the picture as fast as possible. Currently I'm pushing the limit of the PC parrallel port at about 1 Mb/s and I'm still having problems with getting a usable picture when there's any movement.

I think that your assumption about the low clock speed is correct.

The only chip I've found so far with a global reset is the LM9630, although this is aimed at very high speed machine vision systems.

I recently found a site for someone who had connected the gameboy to a micro and used it to do all sorts of clever image tracking etc. I think it was something to do with the SeattleRobotics club but their site appears to be down at the moment.

Also have a look at

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Regards, Rob>Hi