The news here isn’t so much that [Guarav Singh] built this high-quality industrial digital camera from scratch, but it’s in the way it was accomplished. That plus the amount of information that’s packed into the write-up, of course. And the excellent photography.
Modularity was one of [Guarav]’s design goals, with the intention of being able to swap out the sensor as the technology changes. To that end, [Guarav] came up with a stack of three PCBs. The middle board of the stack contains a Lattice FPGA chip along with two 16-MB RAMs and the FPGA config flash. The sensor board lies on one side of the FBGA board, while the USB 3.0 board is on the other. Each six-layer board is a masterpiece of high-density design, and the engineering that went into interfacing them and getting everything squeezed into a 3D-printed case with an integrated aluminum C-mount ring is pretty impressive.
[Guarav]’s write-up goes into a great deal of detail on processing the sensor data on the FPGA. Also, there’s quite a bit of practical information on implementing MIPI (Mobile Industry Processor Interface) and the CSI (Camera Serial Interface) specification. We’ve delved into this world before, but this project is a great hands-on explanation that might really help move your MIPI project along.
Thanks for the tip, [STR-alorman].
