On that note: I'm looking for a mouse style camera sensor unit that can export full frame rate raw to a system where I can actually decode such an absolute positioning code.
Anyone got something in the sub-100$ range?
https://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/common-mouse-based-optical...
https://github.com/RCmags/ADNS3080_frame_capture
https://www.pixelelectric.com/sensors/distance-vision/adns-3...
If anyone has explored further how much the timing can be optimized, or maybe there are other mice sensors for with better frame dumping capabilities, I am curious to hear about it as well.
With that said even if you remove all the unnecessary delays data transfer over SPI will likely be a limiting factor for very high framerates. Assuming 4MHz SPI and 32x32 8bpp image that would be at most 500FPS. Few hundred FPS would still be nice, and you might push it a bit higher with increasing frequency but it's probably not possible to push it much further than 1000FPS without MIPI or some kind of other parallel data transfer protocol.
The ardupilot project in sibling comment seems to be using the mouse movement output directly instead of capturing the frame and then doing optical flow analysis on main CPU. The image dump is only being used to verify camera focus.