Live data from Hacker News

2bit Astrophotography with the Game Boy Camera

home.strw.leidenuniv.nl

51–56 of 56 posts

Re: 2bit Astrophotography with the Game Boy Camera

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that. I guess I was just confused as to why your first thought was to use a speaker to move the photo diode as opposed to an Arduino with a stepper motor.

It's an exercise in simplicity. Adding an Arduino is a little against the spirit.

Can you explain how a speaker with a square wave would move the diode? I'm so confused.

Re: 2bit Astrophotography with the Game Boy Camera

#53
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also interestingly get the raw sensor data from the Pi camera too, as in before the demosaicing is applied. I wonder, this may be silly, but could you not potentially get a slightly higher resolution image, if you just created a pixel for every sensel. Than if you were to apply the demosaicing algorithm then convert to grayscale.

> I wonder, this may be silly, but could you not potentially get a slightly higher resolution image, if you just created a pixel for every sensel. Than if you were to apply the demosaicing algorithm then convert to grayscale. That's along the lines of what the Leica Monochrom promises. One drawback of doing it with a regular Bayer sensor is that the colour filters eat light, so while the number of pixels will increas…

You'd get the same resolution because colour cameras interpolate (demosaicing). If you converted to grayscale you might get problems because each pixel has a different colour response with the bayer filter. You'd still need to do some intensity correction.

The performance of the Leica Monochrom is due to this - you don't get more pixels per sensor, but you get proper intensity values at each pixel. This corresponds to better effective spatial resolution in most cases. All they're doing is selling you an identical sensor and pretending it's something fancy and new...

When you buy industrial cameras, the colour and mono versions are identical, but one is filtered (they use the same detector). We use mono in industry often because image quality tends to be much better than colour, and you have a third of the bandwidth requirements (or you want to filter a specific waveband).

Re: 2bit Astrophotography with the Game Boy Camera

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do this even without any motion and possibly even with no focusing optics, just with a single sensor, diffraction grating and a lot of math. This is called single-pixel imaging and is an ongoing research topic in computational imaging.

http://www.gperco.com/2014/10/single-pixel-camera.html

This is incredibly cool! I wonder what the simplest possible non-mechanical modulator is. (LCD?)

Re: 2bit Astrophotography with the Game Boy Camera

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an exercise in simplicity. Adding an Arduino is a little against the spirit.

Can you explain how a speaker with a square wave would move the diode? I'm so confused.

Sawtooth, not a square wave. Hook the speaker up to some kind of frame, glue a small hinge to the cone, hinge to an arm that's anchored relatively close to the speaker, diode at the far end of the arm in a tube so the light is directional, instant scanner :)

Re: 2bit Astrophotography with the Game Boy Camera

#56
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man I loved that watch - I still have it in my watch box somewhere, but it miss behaves now. I regret not buying the black plastic versions for spares when they were about £12 each. Ho hum!

In 2007 my friend got working WQV-1. I tried it and for me it was something like "007" artifact. Think, if I could buy one sometime - I will buy it immediatly!

They still come up on ebay, but the prices are higher now. But still much less than the £200 it cost in 2001 or whenever I got it.
Post reply on HN