Raspberry Pi Lets You Have Your Own Global Shutter Camera For $50 (engadget.com) 41
Global shutter sensors with no skew or distortion have been promised as the future of cameras for years now, but so far only a handful of products with that tech have made it to market. Now, Raspberry Pi is offering a 1.6-megapixel global shutter camera module to hobbyists for $50, providing a platform for machine vision, hobbyist shooting and more. From a report: The Raspberry Pi Global Shutter Camera uses a 6.3mm Sony IMX296 sensor, and requires a Raspberry Pi board with a CSI camera connector. Like other global shutter sensors, it works by pairing each pixel with an analog storage element, so that light signals can be captured and stored by all pixels simultaneously. By comparison, regular CMOS sensors read and store the light captured by pixels from top to bottom and left to right. That can cause diagonal skew on fast moving subjects, or very weird distortion on rotating objects like propellers.
Nice (Score:3, Insightful)
Except, what am I supposed to hook this up to?
Re:Nice (Score:4, Informative)
If you're interested but worried about delays, Raspberry Pi recently posted that it has been working on resolving supply chain issues. "We expect supply to recover to pre-pandemic levels in the second quarter of 2023, and to be unlimited in the second half of the year," it said in a December blog post. The Global Shutter Camera is now available to purchase for $50.
Re:Nice (Score:4, Interesting)
From the article:
If you're interested but worried about delays, Raspberry Pi recently posted that it has been working on resolving supply chain issues. "We expect supply to recover to pre-pandemic levels in the second quarter of 2023, and to be unlimited in the second half of the year," it said in a December blog post. The Global Shutter Camera is now available to purchase for $50.
The only question is whether which will stop being vaporware first: Banana Pi M6 or Raspberry Pi 4.
Two years of low to near-zero availability has already forced me to rewrite a bunch of code to support Rock Pi and other platforms by replacing Raspberry-Pi-specific APIs with alternatives, so I no longer care whether they get their act together. And given the announcement that Raspberry Pi 5 won't ship in 2023, as soon as Banana Pi M6 ships, I think I'm done with Raspberry Pi.
A raspberry pi? (Score:1)
Except, what am I supposed to hook this up to?
A raspberry pi. The pi is a complete computer running linux, you can literally connect a keyboard, mouse, and display and start doing computery things on it. It will run just about any linux software you can run on a desktop machine.
Taking video of moving objects with a standard camera leads to defects due to the pixels being scanned into memory.
Suppose you take an image of a moving train. The top section of the image would show the train one position, while the bottom section of the image comes into memory
Re:A raspberry pi? (Score:4, Funny)
woosh
Re: (Score:2)
I'm going to choose to believe the GP wrote all that as an ironic reply commenting on the GGPs cliched response to every Raspberry Pi story with a post pretending such things don't exist.
Re:Raspberry pi supplemental (Score:5, Funny)
A further note. The Raspberry Pi is a device classified as a "Von Neumann architecture" stored-program computing device, which allows data and program instructions to be stored in a commonly-accessed memory subsystem.
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Further note. The Raspberry Pi device is neither a fruit nor a pastry. You should not consume one.
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Further note. The Raspberry Pi device is neither a fruit nor a pastry. You should not consume one.
Now you tell me. :(
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You can get a RasPi "kit"
Really? [rpilocator.com]
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Not detailed enough. I need more details. Also, can I use a microwave to heat it up instead of an oven?
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Cool. Where can I actually obtain a Raspberry Pi from without paying scalper ransom?
(Which is the point of the GP post.)
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Where can I actually obtain a Raspberry Pi
How should I know where you keep yours? Mine are scattered around various places in my house. If you don't have a few laying around, are you sure you're on to the right website? I'm puzzled by the idea of someone posting to Slashdot who doesn't have at least a couple of Raspberry Pis laying around.
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I have a 3b+ in a drawer and a zero W in a drawer, while another one is connected to my bedroom tv to watch movies on, but if I wanted a pi 4 with lots of ram, it seems it's not really available at an affordable price anymore. That's what everyone is attempting to point out. The whoosh comment was particularly funny, especially when Okian_warrior doubled down on the explanation.
Of course, I'm probably just feeding a troll at this point.
RPi showing up again ... (Score:2)
Where can I actually obtain a Raspberry Pi from without paying scalper ransom?
A local electronics shop that has historically carried RPi got some 3B+ recent, the first shipment in quite a while. Things may be improving.
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You can hook this up to almost anything with a CSI port. Some software is necessary to make it work but it's not hard to adapt an RPi solution to anything else with MIPI-CSI (my highly biased recommendation is a Jetson Nano). RPi4 is going to be the path of least resistance, if you already own one. Else, pick something else there is no inventory of them right now and huge markups on eBay and Amazon for them.
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Cart, horse... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sounds great. But maybe they could focus on making the actual Pi available for that price again first.
^THIS^
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Great marketing ploy to try to generate positive buzz for would-be Pi hobbyists instead of doing something about the unavailability of Pi to hobbyists.
I just checked rpilocator and filtered on USA and, no surprise, there's nothing available. I'm signed up for notifications for multiple Pi products at Adafruit and haven't received an in-stock notice since January 2022.
Until the people in charge of Pi let the price float up to fair-market-value and quit giving away the vast majority of the supply to industr
Re:Cart, horse... (Score:4, Informative)
That remains to be seen, of course, but there is some hope.
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Most of the Raspberry Pi Foundation employees are out shovelling sand for the chip foundries, but it turns out there are a few who can't do that for various reasons, so they're designing camera boards instead.
The most important question (Score:2)
Does it fit on a Banana Pi? Or some other available SOC computer?
Like a leaf shutter (Score:4, Informative)
In the days when cameras used film instead being digital, I remember basically two kinds of shutters. They were both mechanical with moving parts which I reckon is impractical for the camera in say a smart phone. What do digital camers normally use? Something like a raster scan, the kind of thing used in the iconoscopes of TV cameras maybe?
For youngsters unfamiliar with how things were done in the old days, but who are curious:
The 'leaf shutter' blocked light from reaching the film with a circle of metal 'leaves' that all flipped out of the way when you 'clicked' the shutter. They had a timer that let you vary the amount of time exposed. The whole of the film was exposed at the same time though.
The other kind of shutter was what was used on Single Lens Reflex Cameras (SLRs). The leaf shutter wouldn't work on them because the lens that focused the image on the film was also the lens that the photographer looked through to frame the picture and see that it was properly focused. So the shutter had to cover the film rather than the lens while that was being done. It would expose the film by sliding a transparent window across the film which created some distortion for a fast moving object since it would move a detectable distance between the time one side of the film got exposed and the other side got exposed. A mirror would direct the light to the photographer's viewport, and then move away when the picture was actually taken. But the mirror was too massive to move quickly enough to act as a shutter.
In the really old days, when film needed a lot of light exposure, the photographer would just remove the lens cap by hand and count out the time for the exposure. That's why a lot of old timey photographs of people show a lot of motion blur.
Re:Like a leaf shutter (Score:4, Informative)
Digital cameras use either "global" or "rolling" virtual shutters. "Global", as described in this article, is just a perfect "all pixels start and stop capturing light at the same time". This is more expensive to make because you need to have extra circuitry and memory on the sensor to read out the value of all sensor pixels more or less simultaneously.
"Rolling" is where the sensor rows are exposed then read out one at a time in sequence, from top to bottom. This is cheaper to make because you only need to be able to read out one row at a time, so fewer A/D converters on board, less memory, etc. This is roughly equivalent to having a "shutter" with a thin horizontal slit that slides from the top to the bottom of the sensor quickly on a film camera. It does what you might imagine to fast-moving objects, distorting them so they are slanted, squashed, or stretched.
There's actually a third secret mode some budget digital cameras use called "global reset release". These are rolling shutter cameras that are setup to start exposing all the rows in the image at once, then read them out as quickly as it can. This means that the rows at the bottom of the image keep collecting light while the top of the image reads out, meaning the image gets brighter and blurrier as you get towards the bottom. However, if you include a mechanical shutter and snap it closed once the desired exposure time has elapsed, the sensor can take its time reading out the rows one-by-one while the shutter protects the still-active sensor from capturing more light. Its a neat idea, but it greatly increases the time between shots so it's not too popular.
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Leaf and focal plane shutters kind of get put in specific boxes for historical reasons. You could make a shutter that operates on the focal plane and has leaves if you wanted to, or a shutter in the lens that coordinates with the mirror in an SLR. Lots of medium format SLRs do it.
The important difference is that a leaf shutter opens from the centre, stays open a specified amount of time, then closes. The whole frame is exposed at the same time. In a curtain shutter, at least at high speed, blades follow eac
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Leaf shutter placed in the right position in the lens acts mostly as a diaphragm, so that for the short time it opens and closes, it basically just reduces the amount of light falling on the film (and changes the DoF, which - as this happens together with the light reduction - will not be very noticeable on the photo). Whereas, if placed in the position of the roller blind shutter, the opening and closing of the shutter has the potential to introduce vignetting, as the shutter blocks the light from falling
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It's pretty easy to fix that with an appropriate gradient ND filter.
The names are the historical thing. Leaf shutters are named after the shape of one of their components. Focal plane shutters are named after their location. You can have a leaf-type shutter on the focal plane or a curtain-type shutter at the pupil plane, or even various other shutter mechanical designs on either plane. Those designs exist. They're not common, both for practical and historical reasons.
What for? (Score:2)
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Global shutters are good for high speed flash sync. You can make a flash of light a lot faster than you can operate any kind of shutter, so if you want a good picture of something moving fast you use a flash and a global shutter. If you want pictures of helicopter blades then a global shutter will make them a blur instead of a curve.
Not sure why you'd attach wheels to a Raspberry Pi and camera, but some Lego ones would be about the right size. Maybe you could train a pet mouse to pull it outside for you?
Re: What for? (Score:2)
That's actually not a good use case. For high speed photography the flash acts as a global shutter, you usually leave the actual shutter open for a long time in relative darkness.
A good use case for global shutter is to do pretty much the same thing, but with a constant light source.
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That works great if you're shooting in darkness. Not so well if you're not.
Death Throes (Score:1)
I literally laughed out loud... (Score:1)