Despite the ongoing parts armageddon, the gang at Group Gets managed to find enough parts to build the new Revision 4 tCam-Mini (Rev 3 won't see the light of day outside of 3 prototypes).

They even surprised me by creating a version that supports an external antenna - great for applications like flying the camera on a drone.

Photos courtesy of Group Gets.  The new cameras can be found here and here.

This version is a bit modernized with a USB-C connector and has connections for the new direct hardware interface supported in firmware versions 2.0 and beyond.  Designed so I could use tCam-Mini as the imager for tCam, the hardware interface allows direct connection of tCam-Mini to another micro-controller or SBC.  It allows tCam-Mini to handle all Lepton VoSPI related issues and provides the same high-level interface as WiFi.  It consists of a serial port running at 230,400 baud and a slave SPI port.  The same json commands and responses are transmitted over the serial port with one exception.  Instead of sending an image over the serial port (which would be too slow) the camera sends a new "image_ready" json packet that also includes the length of the image.  Then the controller can use a SPI master to read the image from the slave SPI port on tCam-Mini.  Full details can be found on the github readme.  The 3.3v logic-level hardware interface is activated when the MODE input is detected low at boot (otherwise the WiFi interface is activated).

The github repository has also been updated with the new hardware design files.