Hi All,
I've recently interfaced a OV7670 camera module to an Xmegae5 microcontroller directly without any external FIFO chips involved. : )
With current configuration, this system sends 20FPS 80x60 grayscale image data over 3Mbaud serial stream. There is 3 byte preamble {0xAA,0x55,0xAA} to indicate the start of a new image frame. Computer software / other MCU can use those bytes to sync with the data stream.
Utilises two EDMA channels, two event channels, two timers and one UART peripheral of the XmegaE5 microcontroller.
Computer software is written in C++ using OpenCV image drawing / matrix functions.
This project is heavily inspired by "Interfacing a cheap phone camera module to a PIC32 microcontroller" project by @mikeselectricstuff. Video link of that project is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQYByorpoFk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQYByorpoFk) Watch that video to get a better understanding of this project. I basically ported his ideas to lower cost / lower feature set 8bit microcontroller.
You can check it in action from Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/113537523 (https://vimeo.com/113537523)
More details: https://github.com/kehribar/xmega_ov7670 (https://github.com/kehribar/xmega_ov7670)
Best,
ihsan.