OmniVision OV9640 hacking

I've been hacking on this camera module in last three days or so. Whew, it gave me quite a pain especially because of the SCCB interface (which is renamed i2c), but I finally defeated it. This chip can be found for example in Palm Zire72. I made some hardware research to figure out what GPIOs drive it. the results are:

• GPIO56 - PWDN
• GPIO57 - RESET
• GPIO91 - DVDD

Ok, with this knowledge, it's simple to setup PXA QCI and read some data from the chip. With a little effort I was able to make a photo using the fswebcam tool. Though the colours were totally off and messed up because the camera chip wasn't configured at all. And here came the main problem.

The problem was, when I tried to communicate with the chip using i2c-pxa driver (the native PXA I2C driver), it didn't work. The i2c driver complained about timeouts etc. Just a while ago, I got quite crazy idea to give the i2c-gpio driver (this one toggles GPIOs to emulate i2c behaviour) a go. To my surprise, it worked. I was able to read registers of the chip and all. So this is it, the whole solution was to use the i2c-gpio driver instead of i2c-pxa.

But here comes another question - why ... why does it work with i2c-gpio and doesn't with i2c-pxa ? I think the problem might be with I2C and QCI clocks supplied to the module (speed, sychro, ... who knows). But interestingly enough, PalmOS seems to use the PXA I2C. So this makes the whole situation even more confusing. So in the end, this will need some further investigation, but at least the camera is working somehow and I can start writing a proper driver for it.