I'd agree that they're lacking in personal tutition - my department is a wee bit disorganised. But we're theoretical engineers - system design. Soldering and the like is something we all learnt ourselves when we were 16. The work I'm doing here leans more towards ICs and the like, and this project is not one from the engineering department.

Anyway, enough of that. The algorithm I've developed reduces the problem to a very simple set of commands. It doens't require the image to be buffered, it works on streaming data. Now, it's very possible that the 8051 family will not be up to the task, but without a means of calculating it I just don't know. I guess you get a feel for it eventually.

The 8051 family is the lowest powered device I'm looking at. The reason I decided to investigate it is that it's ubiquous, and would seemingly make a good staring point. Lots of help available, as shown here (8 replies in 24 hours!).

That cheap ARM board looks good but the uC is soldered on. For this application, I'll be intergrating into a PCB design, so I'm looking for the device by itself (which presumably would be cheaper yet..).