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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 that the SoC the Raspberry Pi line is based on has no kernel support (or IIRC hardware support) for S3 or anything similar.
Comparing that to a real camera: I can "quick draw" pick up a Nikon DSLR that's off, flick the power switch and hit the shutter button one handed in one motion as fast as I can move and there's a good picture on the screen as soon as I let go of the trigger. Double click trash can and it's gone. Either will take less than half a second. Battery life is so long I usually forget to charge it. I suspect the power switch is just a "key lock" that prevents triggering anything because there's no delay. Either that or it's a wakeup in the microcontroller range of timing.
(You can easily get jank by filling up the buffer or slow memory card or autofocusing on something impossible, possibly in the dark etc, of course.)
I bet this could be changed to seconds if a unikernel type approach were used. There’s no need to boot a full OS. I understand the developer starting with Linux, though, as I’m sure it’s easier for debugging.
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.
yeah it's pretty fair if you compare them apples to apples.
an iphone boots in 15-20s depending on how stale things are, you'll presumably need to unlock it, and then navigate to the camera app however you do so.
it's just presumed you wont have to boot your phone.
Shaved a Pi Zero W boot from ~19s to under 7 by disabling dhcpcd, bluetooth, and swapfile generation, then trimming console clear/getty at boot. Biggest win was systemd-analyze blame showing NetworkManager-wait-online eating 4+ seconds for a camera that never needs network.
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 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 with and have built a rangefinder-style camera [4], built around the IMX585 or IMX283 (the only boards I got my hands on) but using a CM5, this thing gets hot. It works though! Not too much bigger than my Leica Q. Haven't released anything yet but I tend to work on it and the model is in OnShape. Currently planning a complete screen-less redesign in FreeCAD... so that's _really_ different and slow, but I'm so over proprietary software :/
There's also the CinePi project using those sensors on a full-size Pi with a pretty active discord server.
While many camera sensors use MIPI/CSI, you need enough lanes to transfer the data, the driver support in the kernel and other pipeline bits to get good images from the bayer. Almost all “real” cameras use ASICs or FPGAs to clock out the images. Additionally sensor companies are miserable to deal with in small volume and datasheets are under NDA. You’re much better off buying a camera from a machine vision company over USB3 or Ethernet, but you need one which properly enumerates as a video device (many do not). You can still do nice stuff like hardware sync/trigger from the Pi.
> 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.
USB webcam on a Pi works fine but that's not really using "the Pi camera" in the sense people mean, it's just a Pi as a USB host. IIRC the whole appeal of the ribbon interface is CSI bandwidth, not something UVC drivers really replicate.
Honest question: why would one switch from a much more capable "carry everywhere" smartphone camera to this? Especially since phone is truly carry always & everywhere and that computational processing squeezes out insane amount of photo quality from already excellent phone cameras.
I have a box full of film gear and development equipment because, one day, I want to hang a picture of my kids on the wall that I _made_. My photo, on film I developed, printed manually by my hand, hung in a frame I built. I'll get to it some day!
The idea of building a camera like this tickles me the same way. It's fun!
In fact I recommend doing that for EVERYTHING you can! You don't need to do it more than once in your life but it's worth going through the actual process to learn.
That being said I also have a FujiFilm Insta to print polaroid size photos for the fridge or to give to guests.
Those though are 2 different processes, one is about learning the other about convenient usage.
Photos aren't only about quality, especially there days where it's popular to use lower resolution cameras, with worse optics. Specifically for portraits, it's common to use diffusion filters that reduce a bit details/contrast or do that in editing so you don't see every little "defect" on someone's skin.
Some people specifically want something other than their phones because they don't want to always have their phone or use it all the time, others want better controls or a different experience.
I loved this project the first time it came around. As much as I wanted to build it out myself, I was shocked at how much the components actually cost to put together. It definitely seems like an improvement on the charmera though, so it all comes out in the wash.
I was looking around but either I missed it or it’s not spelled out. Do you recall a ballpark cost for the components? I didn't feel like individually pricing out the many components.
I wonder why this doesn't use the 4608x2592 resolution the sensor is capable of. It produces cropped 2592x2592 images. Stylistic choice, hopefully not too hard to reconfigure?
This is very cool, it would be huge if this camera could go on fields "traditional cameras" didn't go in, and iphones cannot give. Like an inbetween both where you can add an objective, and send photos to your phone via BLE or something. This would allow for a "professional camera" where you can edit your photos you just took
The one I was impressed with that came out recently is this one https://github.com/Yutani140x/saturnix-camera this one (optocam) is cool it has heart/soul on an aesthetic perspective
The output reminds me a little bit in fuzziness of the earliest 640x480 digital cameras from the mid to late 90s that stored images on a 4MB compactflash card.
Has anyone measured shutter lag on this? Full Linux boot means a real camera stack too — capture pipeline, autofocus if any, write to SD. Curious if there's a noticeable delay between button press and actual exposure, not just cold boot time.
