PMOD for OV7670 VGA Camera

This is the first post on this blog. Basically, this is a test post, if you want to call it that. Welcome! A few months back, I was introduced to the BRISKI Barrel-core processor at the university by Riadh, its creator. The simplicity and performance (for parallelizable use-cases) are astonishing. I ported this core to my BASYS3 board and showed it to my colleagues at work. What the 16 cores—and thus 64 threads (note: 64 threads on this small FPGA! Amazing!)—do is draw a fractal animation. I wanted to expand on this and felt that an image processing use-case with live camera data could be quite impressive.

Link to the code: https://github.com/matztron/Fractaski-Basys3

Anyway, in my quest to add sensor input to the Basys3 FPGA, I soldered this:

This is a rats-nest! And you want to know why? Because of, basically, Murphy’s law. I had two possible orientations for the camera—and I chose the one that would make wiring more difficult!

There’s a blog post that suggests a practical pinout without much wire mess. I followed this pinout, but then I oriented the camera the other way, and suddenly I had to do a lot of extra work.

Anyway—we live in a world where ordering a PCB from halfway around the globe takes about as much time as hand-soldering ;) That’s why I designed this PMOD adapter! Status

Status

I have not received or tested it yet, which is why I will not upload the KiCAD project files for now. This post was also more or less a test to see how this new website and the deployment of new content works.