Stock is set to improve this year anyway so don't sell your kidney quite yet.
Exaggeration. I can walk to a shop 20 minutes away and buy them off the shelf for RRP.
I could get it off Amazon but it's $260 USD.
It’s not /great/, but given the supply chaos of the last few years it is what it is.
I believe it should be much easier now.
So ridiculous these sensors and data lanes on everything embedded can't get us 240FPS at even VGA resolution.
This article been on the HN frontpage at least twice: "A Guide to Recording 660FPS Video On A $6 Raspberry Pi Camera" - https://blog.robertelder.org/recording-660-fps-on-raspberry-...
- Aug 6, 2019 | 103 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20627574
- Dec 27, 2021 | 64 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29703293
Obviously, the resolution is really low (640x64) but for the price, the quality seems quite nice.
Edit: Raspberry Pi compute module 4 has all 4 CSI-2 data lanes exposed. So you can get full bandwidth of this interface and could use high resolution sensors.
The new sensor is IMX708 and probably not supported yet.
In order to enable higher framerates you need to set up additional "modes" in some configuration file. I assume that by default only "relatively reliable modes" are configured. That's where the limitation to 120 FPS comes from. Calculating other modes requires some special tool that is specific to the camera chip. Also you need some luck that those modes actually work for you.
The V1 camera module (OV5647) only supported two lanes, so it was a fair enough decision then, but they had a chance to change it when they changed connector on the PiZero.
The connector even had the 4 extra pins specifically to support 4 lane CSI, but it was as if it was forgotten about. The V2 camera came out not long after so the combination would have made for a massive upgrade.
I think they ended up back peddling from the new connector due to the horrific combination of a too thin custom flat flex cable with a connector that could barely meet its 10 mating cycle rating.
It didn’t have to be that way, a standard 0.5mm FFC with decent swing down latch connector is 10x more robust.
The limiting factor is how long it takes to shift a row of pixels out of the CCD and into the ADC - wide-but-short videos can be recorded at 200+ fps pretty easily.
I looked into making one during the pandemic - but i think lack of auto-focus was one of the things that caused me to rule it out at the time…
But before getting a better camera I'd try to improve lighting, try to have lots of uniform white diffused light coming from at or behind the camera; simple things like white LED strips at the back of the monitor bounced off a wall or other surface behind it can work well because Teams/Zoom will compress and shrink your video to death anyway, so high resolution and fine detail are wasted, but a kinda well-lit person will still look decent even in a tiny and brutally compressed thumbnail on a laptop screen and I'm not aware of any AI filter that actually does a good job at simulating that, and any that did probably wouldn't fit on a Raspberry Pi anyway.
And before doing even that, I'd make sure my audio is actually decent, since that's what most people take for granted since it is for granted in real-life meetings, but being hard to understand or sounding harsh and jarring is something people react to a lot more strongly and viscerally to than bad-ish video, often without even realizing that's what bothers them about a person. Think of it like meeting to get work done in a dimly-lit room vs. in the middle of a construction site – people sometimes do the former on purpose, e.g. to improve projector image quality, but the latter will feel jarring to most, especially if you're the only person who sounds like that. Important to use the test call functionality in Zoom/Teams/... since their compression may reduce quality by a lot. External USB microphones can be a good inexpensive option, something like a Behringer C-1U, anything bluetooth tends to sound rather ugly.
And before doing even that, I'd think real hard if even that's actually needed. Most people seem to not give a damn and are just fine not sounding and looking like a newsperson. There might be more profitable things to put that time and money towards.
Maybe people have a different setup that I, but I usually remain the same distance away from my monitor at most times.
Webcams in poor lighting conditions benefit from autofocus, because autofocus makes it easier to use a larger aperture, improving low light performance.
Laptop webcams benefit from autofocus because there's no room for manual focus controls, and the distance to the user will vary substantially depending on if the laptop's in a docking station, if the user's leaning in to read some small text, etc.
Meeting room webcams benefit from autofocus so you don't need a technician to attend every time it gets knocked out of focus.
PC webcams sometimes benefit from autofocus, because the cable usually weighs more than the camera, meaning the camera often gets moved and knocked about. Plus about 95% of home users with manual focus webcams don't even know they need to focus them.
Streamers have great lighting and cameras firmly mounted on solid tripods - but they're often using mirrorless interchangeable-lens cameras, so they get autofocus for free anyway.
Back then you needed a Pi Zero for USB device mode and a specific software version for this to be supported other than that it just worked.
How can we assess a ~12MP camera based on examining images from it that are all inexplicably reduced to 0.3MP?
https://www.raspberrypi.com/app/uploads/2023/01/ely2_no_hdr-...
https://www.raspberrypi.com/app/uploads/2023/01/ely2_wide_no...
https://www.raspberrypi.com/app/uploads/2023/01/underexposed...
https://www.raspberrypi.com/app/uploads/2023/01/overexposed....
I'd say the sensor is very good but the lenses they're using aren't capable of a full 12 MP of resolution. The wide angle lens controls distortion pretty well, but the standard lens shows a little distortion around the sides.
Still a huge improvement over the Camera Module v2 in every aspect. Autofocus worked especially well, even better than the ArduCam models I tested last year.
I do have a RasPi in use that runs some heavier software like a Hue bridge emulator written in Python (diyHue), and for some of my projects I now have that Pi do more intensive computation centrally and then just dispatch results to esp32s.
I'm currently building one of those refresh-once-a-day framed e-ink "newspaper on the wall" projects. In the picture frame I just have the panel, an IT8951 display controller and an esp32, all running off a LiPo pouch, mostly in deep sleep. The RSS scraping and pdflatex+ghostscript pipeline to produce the image is running on the central Pi in this.
A single Pi may be all you need if your projects live on a network!
Edit edit: I still have no idea...see reply from 'mrbteveman below.
Old first edit (wrong): Apparently, yes. This comment[0](2019) explains it slightly more. Evidently the ribbon cable ("CSI interface") can be used by pretty much anything...as long as that thing is not a camera / doesn't need the usual on-board image processing.
Evidently this prevents anyone from coming out with pi-compatible cameras with different features, e.g. different resolutions/framerates/night vision/infrared/zoom/etc.
That was because the previous camera was widely copied and they wanted to not put money into making driver for a camera just for user to go and buy cheap copy
RPi's modules are priced reasonably enough to compete against clones from China's vendor, really hard to do, but it did it so far like a magic.
A variety of cases either provide access to the connector, or have a camera mount. You can find them by searching.
The less hurdles in the prototyping phase the better. I know it sounds impossible, but this wiring this to that always gets on my nerves.
So a software wiring kinda thing with a "wireless" approach would be very much welcomed.
Not much, but better than when there were only like a dozen per week. And Eben Upton says it should improve and not be an issue by the second half of this year.
I sure hope that's the case, because it feels like it's been 2 years since I could just buy one at Micro Center, and the other SBC boards I've been testing are either too unsupported/unpopular or quite expensive as well.
I realize it would be $1500 but I'd buy it in a heartbeat, there is SO much I could do with a hacker-friendly DSLR-quality sensor.
What are other great combos that exist out there?
The most important upgrade is the inclusion of autofocus (using PDAF) with full support from libcamera and Picamera2. It is pretty snappy though not quite as good as something like a Pixel or iPhone.
There's also a new M12-mount HQ camera, for the same price of $50, which is useful for some more specialty lenses (though I haven't run into any M12 lenses in my own work!).
https://www.vision-components.com/
their support wasn't exceptional in the past but kinda improved recently.
the modular camera module ecosystem is quite interesting, using this for research.
