Saturday, June 27, 2009

Custom PCB for Toshiba TCM8230MD Camera

I recently purchased a few small TCM8230MD CMOS cameras made by Toshiba from SparkFun. I plan on using the camera for some machine vision experiments as they are controlled by an I2c bus and have an 8 bit parallel video out with sync and clock. This makes them very microcontroller interfacing friendly. I plan to use a higher end PIC micro to receive the picture data and process the received video frames. The only issue is that I didn't realize how small these cameras actually are until I tried to use one.

My first attempt at soldering didn't go so well as the solder pads on this device are extremely small. Since no breakout board is available and the lead spacing on this device appears to be non-standard, I went for a custom PCB design.

I made the initial pattern in Eagle using the dimensions from the datasheet to space the solder pads for it, than drew simple traces to solder pads for two headers. I then used the instructions here to transfer the trace layout to a copper PCB.


A nice thing about this simple board is that I didn't have to worry abut mirroring the layout when printing as the orientation of the camera doesn't matter. Once the board was etched in Ferric Chloride, it looked like this:


Not bad for a quick design, there was one weak trace that was etched too much but a little solder will fix that. One note about etching, It took much longer to etch than anticipated. About 20 minutes was needed with me agitating the board for the last 10 minutes.

A reflow procedure was used to solder the camera down, I did it with an electric skillet. After reflow, a quick test showed no shorts and inspection of the pins to pads looks good. I plan on starting to use it tonight.

Now that I have made the board, I would have changed a few things. I should have made pin 1 on the camera line up with the standard pin 1 location on the board. I should have also made all the header pins along one side of the board instead of two so I could use right angle headers to mount the camera vertically. I also didn't forget to drill the holes in the board for the headers, I purchased new PCB drill bits online and they have not arrived yet. I'll just solder jumpers to the pads for now. Yes i'm impatient.

9 comments:

  1. Hello,
    I am interested at working with this sensor. but I am looking for the PCB layout. what software did you use for making this layout. If you don't mind , would you please post the file of PCB?
    my email address is tajallipour@yahoo.com

    thanks in advance
    ramin

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  2. hey, I´m new on this topic but I want to work with this camera, so I need to know if someone of you can help me. How do I know the transfer data speed on this specific camera?

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  3. well, the camera is Toshiba TCM8230MD...
    thanks in advance

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  4. Awesome article and I like your layout. I just got one of these pea-sized cameras, too. So, I'll have to whip up a breakout PCB like yours soon. Thanks for sharing this project--big help for me! --Michael

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  5. I just bought this camera from sparkfun, my plan is to create a breakout board such as yours and connect it to an FPGA that takes the RGB out and encodes it to motion JPEG or MPEG. How was your experience with this camera?

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  6. please send me an e-mail at my e-mail d4n1s.ftw@gmail.com . I want to talk to you. ... I am trying day and night to make this thing work and I can't... Its really important for me.

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  7. hey,i'm working with the camera right now..do you mind to send the file of PCB? my email address is mr.shahrir@gmail.com

    thanks

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  8. Thanks for creating this great informational resource.pcb design

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  9. Thanks for the rare information, how much time is required to solder each pad, did the plastic on camera started to melt anyway???

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