Imaging & Optical Sensing

From NTSC frame grabbers to today's advanced CMOS image sensors, range gated imagers and high dynamic range optical sensors I've been involved from early in my career. Here are a few projects that may be of interest.

An Everyday Camera

One of the first CMOS imagers. Class 0 Bluetooth (20dBm), 128MB of memory and a DSP for image processing. PCB was a 12-layer 1" square with blind and buried vias!

What's this a PDA?

Long before the smartphone we had the 'Portable Data Assistant'. No Internet but we had Bluetooth and a portable, windowed interface!

Frame Grabber

I built this for an autonomous robot back in 1998. Before CMOS imagers, you made your own PCB and used a GAL to control a frame grabber connected to an NTSC camera.

Range Gated Imager

Range gated imagers are used in difficult lighting conditions. This design integrated all CCD readout and display logic into a single FPGA using a Microblaze soft core.

Optical Sensor

Just a simple ambient light sensor with massive dynamic range, from full sun to moonless night sky.