Welcome to the firmware onboarding for Waterloo Reality Labs!

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At Reality Labs, our default platform is the Raspberry Pi series of microcontrollers. We’re also going to do low-level programming on other Raspberry Pis, but that's a much more complicated story…

For this onboarding, we’re going to play around with a camera module based on the RP2040, which is one of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s popular microcontrollers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP2040

https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2040/rp2040-datasheet.pdf

Hopefully, more knowledge about camera controls will help you understand one of the most important things in VR: inside-out positional tracking via sensor fusion (camera + IMU data).

Before you start!

Join the Waterloo Reality Labs Discord server: https://discord.gg/6yACASnqMj

Post your progress and GitHub repo (later in the document) in the onboarding channel here: https://discord.com/channels/1181690091853328455/1423704208959344820

A Peek at the Hardware

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The RP2040 camera module, aka PICO-Cam-A, is a tiny devkit designed by Waveshare.

The package includes the following: