Eye shield gives your Arduino an eye

Spotted in the Make Flickr pool:

David Chatting built this Arduino Eye Shield so that he could hook up an analog video camera to his Arduino. It sounds pretty crazy, however by utilizing an LM1881 video sync separator chip and some comparators, he was able to use the Arduino to capture at least 8 1-bit monochrome values from each line of video data. With a bit more work, it sounds like the resolution could be doubled, and more color bits could be added. Pretty impressive for a tiny microcontroller! He’s using the shield for his Reflections in Cider exhibit, and has more photos of the installation in his Flickr set.