Show HN: Modular Pi Cam

72 points by jcun4128 1 year ago | 24 comments

This is the third camera I've designed/made around the raspberry pi parts/ecosystem.

The repo has all the STL files, parts list, most wiring diagrams. The first one was the custom Pi Zero HQ cam which was featured on a Hackaday article/podcast.

The modular version (aside from being able to swap cameras) mostly has the latest software. Recently I added the ability to process videos in the background (ffmpeg merges wav/mp4 files together).

The camera uses crop-zoom-panning for dialing in shots with manual lenses. The menu is created by layering images/text with PIL. Live preview is a little slow as it's SPI based.

If anybody is a pro at python I'd appreciate insight on better code. I've mostly just followed a context-based folder layout regarding where everything is.

I have not added custom/manual settings yet, it uses auto settings for the most part except for when you use a V3 camera module (which has electronic aperture) then it uses the d-pad to set the focus/diopter value.

I have another camera in mind/future build although it's more tailored for videos.

Some sample video I've shot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkjXkQD0j9w

Assembly video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXG-MoIw93Q

At some point I will rewrite the code for a new general purpose DIY camera software from what I've learned, that'll be an undertaking.

dheera 1 year ago |

I just really wish Raspberry Pi would come out with a truly HQ camera with a full frame 35mm sensor, or at least an APS-C sensor. I'd pay $1000-1500 for it, just to have something as good as a full frame camera but programmable and hackable.

I would love to build a full frame mirrorless camera that runs my own UI. I'm pretty sure I could code a much more advanced UI than Sony or Canon.

Their current HQ camera is more like an LQ camera and there is not a huge variety of high quality photographic lenses available for it.

geerlingguy 1 year ago | |

Check out Will Whang's work: https://www.willwhang.dev

He and the developer of the Pieca camera (https://teaandtechtime.com/pieca-a-raspberry-pi-camera-syste...) have both been tinkering with 1" sensors, which seems to be the current limit for what kind of sensor works okay with the Pi's CSI interface.

I haven't found a larger sensor that is available to mere mortals yet, but it would be neat to get to 35mm someday.

michaelt 1 year ago | |

I suspect the price point the Raspberry Pi targets isn't easily compatible with a truly high quality camera.

As I understand things, the Pi has a single lane of CSI at maybe 1.5 Gbps. That's enough for 1080p video, it's not enough for 4k video.

A high-end smartphone, on the other hand, has more like 5 Gbps of bandwidth to the camera, and the processing power needed to deal with that much data. But the device cost is 10x what an RPi costs, so they can afford it.

jcun4128 1 year ago | |

I have seen some people work on a Kodak sensor and also Cine Pi's latest work with the IMX585 sensor is really amazing (4K/8K upscaled). The IMX585 sensor is expensive though compared to the HQ Cam IMX477. Here I'm using the Pi Zero 2 here so can't do 4K I believe (data lanes limit or something, also writing to SD card).

Kodak sensor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma9FrN5COIo

Recent CinePi work https://youtu.be/tI7hIKG1v40?si=BUvOOGutQJDnv09q&t=177

I'm not affiliated with CinePi I'm just amazed what you can do when you know what you're doing ha (eg. color grading)

ipsum2 1 year ago | | |

CinePi didn't develop the hardware, that's Will Whang's (https://www.willwhang.dev/OneInchEye/) work.

buildbot 1 year ago | | |

Thanks for the link to the Kodak sensor - that's awesome, because those sensors have a fairly common interface across all the other Kodak sensors like the 48x36mm Medium format 22MP sensors... It would be pretty easy to adapt this project to make your own CCD medium format camera!

poulpy123 1 year ago | |

there is no market for a 1500$ raspberry pi camera

jcun4128 1 year ago |

Here is a write up on topics covered by these camera iterations

https://medium.com/@jdc-cunningham/making-a-user-interface-f...

A lot of pictures and full menu map

And MS paint wiring diagrams

(1st camera) https://github.com/jdc-cunningham/pi-zero-hq-cam/tree/master...

(2nd camera orange) https://github.com/jdc-cunningham/modular-pi-cam/blob/master...

daniel_reetz 1 year ago | |

Nice work! What's the boot time like? I didn't see it in your Medium page.

jcun4128 1 year ago | | |

It's slow haha. Faster on the Pi Zero 2 with bookworm. I think it's 20-30 seconds.

I use systemd to run main.py let me time it real quick.

Edit: I was off, it's 40 seconds when the intro animation starts playing.

This is why the camera spends most of its time in the home screen state until you're ready to take a photo which is when the live pass through plays or while recording a video (allows you to change focus/aperture while filming). That also conserves power since it has the highest current draw while recording/showing a live preview.

p0w3n3d 1 year ago |

My observation regarding prices:

resistor - $.10.

resistor for Arduino: $10.00

gruturo 1 year ago |

Did anyone have any luck capturing stereoscopic videos at any meaningful quality? This used to be only possible with the Pi Compute module (unobtainium for a very long time) but the Pi5 finally exposes both camera ports.... while also dropping hardware encoding, which is likely to be a huge roadblock since I doubt there's enough CPU power + bandwidth to compress 2 4K streams at 60fps in realtime and store it. And I'd love to go even higher actually.

The official forums are surprisingly devoid of anyone trying this, which is not super encouraging.

I'd really like to experiment in doing some underwater VR180 photo/videography, I promise to share the results if anyone has any useful pointers (not strictly rPi related, but other platforms are even less promising. Happy for any unexpected hints tho!)

(Sorry for the barely-on-topic (if not outright offtopic)) but this is a rare chance to tap into HN's hive mind on this particular issue due to a Pi-camera related thread on the front page.

ugh123 1 year ago |

Great work!