It's sprouting peripherals

A quick session with the soldering iron, some female headers on the m3pi board and some right angle headers on the peripherals, and my Pololu is starting to look a little different. At the front is a 4D Systems uCAM serial JPEG camera module with the ability to also output RAW images as a simple stream of uncompressed pixel data; ideal for further processing. Just behind this, to give some visual feedback, is a Sparkfun Nokia 6100 breakout board. Thankfully, getting up and running is accelerated nicely by the kind contributors at mbed.org who have published code to interface with the m3pi, the Nokia LCD and the uCAM. With this rich source of code to build upon, it wasn't too difficult to get camera taking a 128x128 pixel, 8 bit greyscale image and display it on the LCD. An hour longer and it was first performing horizontal or vertical edge detection using a simple 2 pixel additive filter kernel. The next task is to build on the edge detection to be able to perform a full, convoluted gradient filter to detect vertical and horizontal edges without needing another 16kB buffer as the mbed doesn't have enough free RAM for that simplistic and inefficient approach.