Electrical – Controlling 3-pin pinhole camera from drone using Arduino

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I've got a pinhole camera from an old drone that I dismantled a few years ago. It has a built in MicroSD reader, and 3 pins (red, black, and yellow). I'm wanting to repurpose the camera for use with an Arduino, but not sure how to communicate with it. If I recall correctly, the drone had the option to take a photo or video. I've connected the red wire into +5v, and black into GND, but not sure what to do with the yellow wire. I tried just writing a high signal with an Arduino to see if the camera would do anything, but it didn't work. An LED came on inside though, so it is being powered. Is there some common communication protocol for cameras like this I could use, or any advice on how I could initialize video recording with it? The drone is no longer functional, so I can't use that to determine the communication. Thanks!

Edit: Here is a photo of the camera with the plastic housing taken offenter image description here

Best Answer

Yellow is often a composite video signal. Connect an oscilloscope to it and see if it looks like a video signal.

From the Hackaday link:

enter image description here

There's a fourth pad by the yellow wire. That might be a digital input to trigger an image capture.

Check that extra pad and the yellow wire. See if either has 5V DC on it. If so, short it to ground through a low value resistor (1k or so) and see if that causes the module to store a photo on the SD card.

Outside of those possibilities, I don't see much you can do with that thing. You are kind of limited by not having a datasheet (or a model number or even a manufacturer name to try and find a datasheet.)

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