Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Optocam Zero: a Pi Zero based digital camera made using off the shelf components

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 64 posts

Re: Optocam Zero: a Pi Zero based digital camera made using off the shelf components

#51

Post by zipy124 »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #26
sottol wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's Will Whang's boards - IMX585 [1] (16:9 1"-ish) and even IMX283 [2] (1") and even IMX294 [3] (Micro 4/3). But just those camera boards run $199 to $399, and released in "artisanal quantities" (I think their hand-assembled!)... so you have to pounce when restocked. Soho Enterprise has some IMX585 boards as well and I've seen some IMX585 MIPI CSI boards on aliexpress afair but never tried them I'm experimenting…

Does iPhone use IMX?

iPhone camera's do not currently use off the shelf sensors.

Other brands do use IMX* sensors, but not the ones listed in this comment, they are larger than the ones typically found in phones such as the IMX712 IMX787 IMX890 etc...

Note than a lot of the phone sensors aren't actually that impressive, but instead rely on an insane amount of computational photography algorithms to improve the image.

Re: Optocam Zero: a Pi Zero based digital camera made using off the shelf components

#52

Post by schrijver »

ktpsns wrote: post #7
Fwirt wrote: post #3

It's a shame that, being based on a full-blown Linux SBPC, it has an absolutely unacceptable boot time for a camera. 22 seconds. I can have my iPhone camera out and ready to capture an ephemeral moment of child's play in under 3 seconds, most commercial cameras boot in seconds as well. A film camera can be ready to go the second the lens cap is off. 22 seconds is an eternity in the world of photography. It's a shame…

It's unfair to compare an idling deep sleep device with a cold boot. However, there is a shortcut: Just don't boot a full OS (thinking of custom firmware which boots in fractions of seconds, standard in the Microcontroller world). Or boot an optimized Linux user space. I am confident with a bit fiddling one can bring down a standard SBC Linux to a few seconds from cold to ready.

You turn a dedicated camera on as you grab it, cold boot, and most of them will be functional before you manage to put your eye to the visor.

Re: Optocam Zero: a Pi Zero based digital camera made using off the shelf components

#53

Post by zokier »

fellowmartian wrote: post #6
Fwirt wrote: post #3

It's a shame that, being based on a full-blown Linux SBPC, it has an absolutely unacceptable boot time for a camera. 22 seconds. I can have my iPhone camera out and ready to capture an ephemeral moment of child's play in under 3 seconds, most commercial cameras boot in seconds as well. A film camera can be ready to go the second the lens cap is off. 22 seconds is an eternity in the world of photography. It's a shame…

It’s possible to boot Linux in seconds, it’d just be a terrible developer experience.

The problem is RPi though, and all the junk it runs before booting Linux.

Re: Optocam Zero: a Pi Zero based digital camera made using off the shelf components

#54

Post by KingOfCoders »

Fwirt wrote: post #3

It's a shame that, being based on a full-blown Linux SBPC, it has an absolutely unacceptable boot time for a camera. 22 seconds. I can have my iPhone camera out and ready to capture an ephemeral moment of child's play in under 3 seconds, most commercial cameras boot in seconds as well. A film camera can be ready to go the second the lens cap is off. 22 seconds is an eternity in the world of photography. It's a shame…

Nice, my Google 10 I feel boots rather fast but I'd say 5sec to boot, unlock, camera +5 secs so it would be 10 for me - 3 seconds I envy you.

Re: Optocam Zero: a Pi Zero based digital camera made using off the shelf components

#56

Post by voidUpdate »

Fwirt wrote: post #3

It's a shame that, being based on a full-blown Linux SBPC, it has an absolutely unacceptable boot time for a camera. 22 seconds. I can have my iPhone camera out and ready to capture an ephemeral moment of child's play in under 3 seconds, most commercial cameras boot in seconds as well. A film camera can be ready to go the second the lens cap is off. 22 seconds is an eternity in the world of photography. It's a shame…

https://mitxela.com/projects/thermal_paper_polaroid talks about making a camera with a raspberry pi, and by using Buildroot they got it down to acceptable boot times

Re: Optocam Zero: a Pi Zero based digital camera made using off the shelf components

#57

Post by numpad0 »

Fwirt wrote: post #3

It's a shame that, being based on a full-blown Linux SBPC, it has an absolutely unacceptable boot time for a camera. 22 seconds. I can have my iPhone camera out and ready to capture an ephemeral moment of child's play in under 3 seconds, most commercial cameras boot in seconds as well. A film camera can be ready to go the second the lens cap is off. 22 seconds is an eternity in the world of photography. It's a shame…

Sub 2-second booting Linux is generally possible, either by bundling everything into a big image or by creating a fixed hibernation file and resuming from it. That's what they do for real embedded systems, but the downside is that they tend to be monolithic and not so update or modding friendly.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTcP3xeLrEY

Re: Optocam Zero: a Pi Zero based digital camera made using off the shelf components

#58

Post by ge96 »

nl wrote: post #22
MoonWalk wrote: post #16

No disrespect to the project here, of course, but I'm wondering why there's no truly high-quality camera for Pis. I have the so-called "high-quality camera" and it still blows. I use it to monitor my 3-D printer with OctoPi, and that's about what it's good for.

There's the Arducam IMX519 with 16 megapixels, Sony IMX 519 sensor https://www.arducam.com/imx519-autofocus-camera-module-for-r...

pixel count is one of those things... arducam has 64 mp cameras too but is it the same as a Sony A7 R3...

Re: Optocam Zero: a Pi Zero based digital camera made using off the shelf components

#60

Post by MoonWalk »

walrus01 wrote: post #47
MoonWalk wrote: post #16

No disrespect to the project here, of course, but I'm wondering why there's no truly high-quality camera for Pis. I have the so-called "high-quality camera" and it still blows. I use it to monitor my 3-D printer with OctoPi, and that's about what it's good for.

> No disrespect to the project here, of course, but I'm wondering why there's no truly high-quality camera for Pis. Not Pi specific on the camera interface ribbon cable, no, but most any raspberry pi 3b or 4 will work with almost any 'high end, high quality' USB webcam type camera for still image capture using all the same software tools that exist for any debian-based CLI environment.

Thanks. I should have specified "using the Pi's camera interface."
Post reply on HN