Interfacing OV7670 digital camera with arduino uno: capturing video and displaying it on TFT Lcd

Recently i tried to interface a low power digital camera with arduino and after lot of hard work i finally get to capture and display video on lcd. For this project i am using OV7670 lower power camera module with 0.3 MP resolution. Lcd is 1.8 inch TFT lcd with 128×160 pixels on screen. Arduino uno is used in the project but other arduino boards can also be used with little modification in the code.

Important: Both the OV7670 camera module and 1.8 inch TFT graphic lcd are working on 3.3v power supply where as my arduino is working on 5v. So i used level shifters in my project for interfacing arduino with camera and tft. I advise you to use arduino powered on 3.3v power supply or better to used arduino nano whose 3.3v operating board is perfect for our project, this will reduce extra level shifter hardware from project.

I found a pretty neat and clean circuit on internet which i used to build my project. You can replace level shifter ics with normal level shift resistor circuit.

OV7670 camera with arduino and 1.8 inch tft LCD

OV7670 Camera

Ov7670 camera is powered using 3.3v arduino output power. To configure the camera its registers must be assessed and written the necessary initialization commands.Registers interface is I2C. So arduino I2C module is used to configure the camera registers. Camera output is received on 8-bit data output lines. Camera data output lines are connected with arduino data pins. Ov7670 needs an extra external clock source for camera to work properly this clock is also provided by the arduino. Pclck is pin which requires an extra clock source. This clock signal is provide by arduino D12 pin which is SPI MISO(Master in slave out) pin.

OV7670 camera with arduino

TFT Lcd Interface

TFT lcd used in the project

The 1.8 inch TFT works on SPI protocol. Arduino SPI port is used to send data to lcd. Note arduino is used in master mode and lcd in slave mode. So we are using only MOSI(Master out slave in) pin of arduino to send data to tft lcd. MISO(Master in slave out) is reserved for clock to camera. TFT is also powered using arduino 3.3v output power supply. Level shifters are also required to send data from arduino uno to tft because both are working on different voltages.

Project code is too lengthy and complex for beginners. Its not easy to explain each and every statement here. You might need to add some libraries in your arduino library folder for succefully compiling the project code for example you might need

LiveOV7670Library
Adafruit_GFX_Library

One just need to make the circuit. Burn the code in arduino and its all done. Your camera will start working. For future work one can interface an SD card with arduino and can save the camera feed in SD card to view latterly as video or image. The project can be used as security camera.