Q:

How do you wire up the OV3640 camera module?

I've been wanting to do a project with this module in mind and have found some resources on it (mainly arducam) but I have no idea how to connect it to a micro controller.
The data sheets show that it has an I2C connection but there are also 9 data wires which seem to have some sort of purpose?
If someone could tell me or point me in the right direction I would be very happy :)

A:

The i2C interface is just to configure the image sensor's parameters. The actual image data is blasted out the parallel camera interface (called CAMIF), which consists of an 8 to 12 bit parallel data bus, plus horizontal and vertical sync signals and a pixel clock. The pixel clock tends to run at 50-100 MHz depending on resolution and framerate, so your microcontroller will need to have a hardware CAMIF module to handle the timing. Many high-end Cortex-M4 and Cortex-A processors from ST, Freescale, and TI have the hardware necessary for this. Obviously, an FPGA/CPLD could also perform this functionality.
You'll also need quite a bit of free memory to hold the frame(s) you grab from the image sensor -- a 2048 X 1536 image, in RGB888, will require ~9.6 megabytes.

