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Wow that brings back the memories. DRAM cameras, or "Rameras" were popular with robotics experimenters in the 80's and 90's. From "Android Design" by Martin Bradley Weinstein:

"The ramera was first developed by the Robotics group at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland Ohio, in 1978."

Apparently they wrote up their work in the Sensor Group Journal. They had used a 4008 which was only 64 x 64 pixels.

Not surprisingly this work was the basis for early optical mice which use what is a DRAM circuit as an imager to detect motion of the mouse in two directions without using a rolling ball. This led to a number of roboticists hacking their optical mice into simple cameras (which was much easier than popping the lid on an increasingly hard to find DRAM chip). That practice was then replaced by using CMOS imagers that had been pretty cheap by the early 2000's and of course these days you can get a camera module for a phone very inexpensively (see the PiCAM for $29 for example)




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