[Announce] PicoCamera – OV camera library for RP2040/RP2350 (Arduino/PlatformIO/Pico SDK)

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Hi everyone!

I’m happy to share PicoCamera, a camera library for RP2040 boards (Raspberry Pi Pico and many others) that supports OV2640, OV3660 and OV7670 sensors. It’s built on PIO + DMA for efficient capture, and its API is intentionally aligned with the well‑known esp32-camera library (just replace the esp_ prefix with pico_).

This library grew out of a discussion with another developer about runtime‑assembled PIO programs – all pins (VSYNC, HREF, PCLK, data) are configured at runtime in a camera_config_t struct, so you never need to edit or re‑compile a .pio file. It works out‑of‑the‑box in the Arduino IDE, PlatformIO, and even bare CMake projects with the Pico SDK.

Installation

Arduino IDE

Open Sketch → Include Library → Manage Libraries…, search for PicoCamera and click Install.

PlatformIO

Add to your platformio.ini:

lib_deps =
    umeiko/PicoCamera@^0.2.0

Quick example

#include <PicoCamera.h>

camera_config_t config = {
    .pin_pwdn = -1, .pin_reset = 29, .pin_xclk = 5,
    .pin_sccb_sda = 12, .pin_sccb_scl = 13,
    .pin_d0 = 14, .pin_d1 = 15, .pin_d2 = 16, .pin_d3 = 17,
    .pin_d4 = 18, .pin_d5 = 19, .pin_d6 = 20, .pin_d7 = 21,
    .pin_vsync = 2, .pin_href = 3, .pin_pclk = 4,
    .xclk_freq_hz = 10000000,
    .sccb_i2c_port = 0,
    .pixel_format = PIXFORMAT_RGB565,   // or PIXFORMAT_JPEG
    .frame_size = FRAMESIZE_QVGA,
    .jpeg_quality = 10,
    .fb_count = 1,
};

void setup() {
    pico_camera_init(&config);
}

void loop() {
    camera_fb_t *fb = pico_camera_fb_get();
    if (fb) {
        // fb->buf, fb->len, fb->width, fb->height
        Serial.printf("frame %ux%u len=%u captured in %ums checksum=%u\n",
                (unsigned)fb->width, (unsigned)fb->height,
                (unsigned)fb->len, (unsigned)(t1 - t0), (unsigned)sum);
        pico_camera_fb_return(fb);
    }
}

Notes / limitations

  • The 8 data pins (pin_d0..pin_d7) must be consecutive GPIOs – this is a hardware limitation of the RP2040 PIO in pins instruction.
  • No PSRAM support; frame buffers live in the 264KB SRAM. For RGB565, stay at QVGA or below in practice; JPEG buffers are estimated as width*height/4 + 8KB.
  • grab_mode is not supported – pico_camera_fb_get() captures one frame blocking (equivalent to CAMERA_GRAB_WHEN_EMPTY).

Repository

GitHub: https://github.com/umeiko/PicoCamera
License: MIT

I’d love to hear your feedback, bug reports, or feature requests. Feel free to open an issue or PR on GitHub.

Happy capturing!

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