The Raspberry Pi HQ camera has appeared in a variety of builds since its introduction back in 2020, and has brought with it many opportunities for photographic projects to compete with the professionals. The latest we’ve been sent is from [Kevin McAleer], who has taken the camera with a full-size Pi and clothed it in a case very similar to the crop of mirror-less compact cameras.
Inside the box is a Waveshare touchscreen that fits on the GPIO header, and a NanoWave 5000 mAH USB battery pack. The camera module fits on the front of the unit, with the C-mount ready to take a lens. Software is still a work in progress and is promised to be a Python script controlling the various camera programs. There are enough Pi camera projects for software to be a matter of choice and taste.
We like the form factor and we like the use of the very compact NanoWave battery, so we think this is a design with some possibilities. Perhaps a cover over the Pi ports might be of use though for general robustness in the face of everyday photography. The question remains though, whether it can come close to the performance of even a budget mirror-less compact camera, and we’re guessing that will depend as much on the operator skill, lens quality, and software capabilities as it does on the Pi HQ module. We look forward to seeing what comes of this project, but meanwhile you can see a video with all the details below the break.
This module has been around for about 4 years now. One wonders if there’s been modules with better sensors since.
of course. would be amazing a full frame sensor with better quality but problem is nda and other problems with image sensors companies.
I remember how there was a leak with the complete imx477 datasheet and after 2 days was removed from website.
Yes. The Arducam 64MP camera is a big step up in quality. It’s about a gen behind current flagship phone camera offerings. It produces very nice images but just like the HQ camera, there’s things like HDR support which would be nice but aren’t yet supported.
No example photos?
Why is it that nowadays these videos contain “how I connected a camera to raspberry pi” and “how I drew a box with Fusion 360” and nothing else. Maybe at best very short clip how the thing actually works.
And is that new trend in vlogging that you need to have some person in background ?
>No example photos?
thats how you know its garbage, or rather offers purely educational value.
Image quality is never good with those. 12 megapixels with a crop factor of 5.5 for still images and 12.5 for video. Also the lenses are fully manual.
You can theoretically run a full RAW converter on the rear touchscreen and edit the picture in place, but it has only 480×320 pixels and isn’t calibrated…
It’s a good educational project, yes. But if you add the cost of all the components, it’s about 200 €, so it’s an expensive educational project.
Last paragraph: “This is the hardware build complete, I’m intending to build out a Python App that can be run on the Raspberry Pi 4 that will be able to record video clips, photos and apply filters. With this being a full blown Raspberry Pi 4, we can also livestream from this camera too.”
There is no software yet.
That will be quite a challenge if actually written in Python. Or maybe just a prototype in python that does 2 frames per second? Writing your own filters is a great way to really get a handle on image processing and video, even if they go very slowly.
The correct way to do this is using the Python libraries for v4l/libcamera that render the camera direct to a display frame in GPU. You dont do actual image processing in Python but tell the GPU what you want it to do.
“There is no software yet.”
Only if you deliberately ignore the software already available to run the camera. Support for the camera in raspistill and raspivid were released along with the camera itself.
This is based on the standard Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera and the usual lenses available from pimoroni. Considering they’re not rewriting its software but they’re “just” building an enclosure for the raspi/display/battery i’d say the pictures will look exactly like all the other pictures from the raspicamera. I agree that adding a couple of picture would have been nice but that’s not the point of this project and plenty of examples are floating around the internet. Screenshots from the UI app they’re working on would be more interesting.
“I made a plastic case, put in some screws and ‘flashed’ some firmware.”
In other news, I installed a vm, and virtual box and everything!
Too bad it’s nearly impossible to find a Pi to begin with.
I never seen anything like this before. What is this used for?
For bullshitting stupid amateurs. This “project” is as useless as possible and I know 100 such useless projects. I observed that probably editing board of the hackaday changed and more and more useless or just stupid projects has been promoted. What is happening?
5000 milliAmpHenry battery?