It would be neat if someone wrote the software to turn something that into an astro-navigation device like https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/sr-71-astroine....
Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera
51–58 of 58 posts
Re: Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera
#52Having done this… - don’t make your camera the highest thing around. My dome was showing scratches. Eventually I got a nice photo of the inside of a juvenile bald eagle’s talon. A bird’s gonna perch where a bird’s gonna perch. Sacrifice some sky and put a better perch next to it. - the manual focus cameras seem to be temperature dependent. Maybe get something that can be auto focused or add a heater to control night…
Regardiing condensation, if you can make the case kind of air tight, maybe you can either fill it with nitrogen, make a light vacuum, or pre-dry the air inside (I remember some tricks to avoid condensation in underwater cameras that consisted in storing it open in the fridge for some hours or something like that, to have drier air inside, I'll look for that again...)
Throw desiccant in there if it’s pretty airtight.
Re: Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera
#53Canadian checking in; Has anyone ever built a cost-effective outdoor camera (pi-based or otherwise) that can withstand extreme cold (~ -35c)? Or, are there any off the shelf products that don't cost an arm and a leg?
Re: Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera
#54I really wish RPi would come out with a truly HQ camera. Their "HQ" camera is really a LOW quality camera with a shitty sensor that isn't even micro-four-thirds. The lens choices are abysmal. I want to see at LEAST APS-C or better yet full frame. Considering a full-blown mirrorless full frame camera costs $2400 it shouldn't cost more than $1000 for sensor only, and I'm 1000% willing to pay for a hackable, programmabl…
Full frame cameras are below $1000. The sensor is probably quarter of that. But your camera module for Raspberry Pi will cost more than $1000. You save some by getting rid of the camera display and buttons. But you still have to design the camera control board, the lens mount or lens, and the housing. You are doing it on small scale, while the camera makers on doing it at large scale and with lots of expertise.
This is why everyone who wants better sensor buys a camera and attaches it to Raspberry Pi.
I am surprised that there isn't a 1" camera module, that is natural place for better sensor but still fits on board and could use C-mount lenses.
Re: Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera
#55I really wish RPi would come out with a truly HQ camera. Their "HQ" camera is really a LOW quality camera with a shitty sensor that isn't even micro-four-thirds. The lens choices are abysmal. I want to see at LEAST APS-C or better yet full frame. Considering a full-blown mirrorless full frame camera costs $2400 it shouldn't cost more than $1000 for sensor only, and I'm 1000% willing to pay for a hackable, programmabl…
I do think the HQ camera is due an upgrade, though I'd prefer a proper low-light camera, ideally Sony Starvis. Although you can buy cheap Starvis modules you don't have full control over the exposure time and/or can only shoot in a compressed format. The HQ camera is well-supported with good drivers, like all Raspberry Pi hardware, which is why people still use the HQ Camera for cheap astronomy projects despite havin…
Full frame cameras typically perform better than "low light" cameras with small sensors. Everything else equal, bigger collection area trumps everything else, simply because more photons means better SNR under shot noise assumptions. SNR of a pixel scales with sqrt(average number of photons collected).
When your full frame sensor has 25X the physical area as a small sensor, that's hard to beat. You can't easily get a 25X increase in number of photons collected on the smaller sensor. There are only so many photons that hit it. You can engineer the hell out of the silicon, but the fill factor multiplied by quantum efficiency of the sensors is already much higher than 1/25 so there is no theoretical room for a 25X improvement even under ideal assumptions. You can increase the number of photons that hit it with bigger, larger aperture lenses, but beyond f/2.0 or so you start hitting limits with our current optical technology in correcting chromatic aberration and other issues, and it will take miracles to get a 25X improvement on the latest state-of-the-art optics.
Sony's full frame sensors also have the same back-illuminated design as their Starvis-branded sensors, by the way, so that part is not unique to Starvis.
Re: Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera
#56I really wish RPi would come out with a truly HQ camera. Their "HQ" camera is really a LOW quality camera with a shitty sensor that isn't even micro-four-thirds. The lens choices are abysmal. I want to see at LEAST APS-C or better yet full frame. Considering a full-blown mirrorless full frame camera costs $2400 it shouldn't cost more than $1000 for sensor only, and I'm 1000% willing to pay for a hackable, programmabl…
The HQ has a C-mount so you can put any C-mount lens on it. And there are plenty of options in that space.
In my case, I simply can't stand the raspberry pi's camera connector so I buy my own "industrial machine vision" cameras with C-mount. In my case I found the Mindvision line to be the best, I connect with either USB3 or GigE (both of which are much nicer cables than the Pi camera connector) and use the Mindvision SDK (it's not a uvc device, instead you write some python that interacts with the camera, giving you deep level of control).
Re: Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera
#57Is there a MIPI camera that doesn't suck? I have every official Pi camera, and they are all just terrible. I would never use them for anything artistic, when it's easy to get far-superior results from even a cheap regular camera or used SLR. I'm just curious if there's a very-high-quality camera with a MIPI interface. Thinking it through... I only really care about video. Even if it's only HD resolution, something wi…
I haven't found any decent MIPI cameras. Instead, I buy machine vision cameras from Mindvision. USB3 or GigE connectors.
Re: Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do think the HQ camera is due an upgrade, though I'd prefer a proper low-light camera, ideally Sony Starvis. Although you can buy cheap Starvis modules you don't have full control over the exposure time and/or can only shoot in a compressed format. The HQ camera is well-supported with good drivers, like all Raspberry Pi hardware, which is why people still use the HQ Camera for cheap astronomy projects despite havin…
Full frame cameras typically perform better than "low light" cameras with small sensors. Everything else equal, bigger collection area trumps everything else, simply because more photons means better SNR under shot noise assumptions. SNR of a pixel scales with sqrt(average number of photons collected). When your full frame sensor has 25X the physical area as a small sensor, that's hard to beat. You can't easily get a…
In general, yes, but there are good reasons not to use a full frame sensor. They’re big, they run hot and they’re expensive. You’re looking at 10x the price range of the HQ cam. And one trouble with big pixels is that it means low pixel density.
If you take an IMX585 astronomy camera it will produce a better quality image than any used or new DSLR in the same price range, despite having pixels a fraction of the size. The (considerable) negative side is the smaller frame.