What would you do with the new raspberry pi high quality camera?

May 12, 2020 12:08 PM

Makers, tinkerers, oculo-gadgeteers of MeFi, it looks as if it would it be fun to make some kind of hyper-specific recording apparatus with the new raspberry pi “high quality camera.” I have a pi but I don’t quite know what to do with it. The camera looks promising, but I am afraid it’s above the skill set of someone who still gets excited when they make a circuit and the led glows. Thoughts?
posted by Morpeth to Technology (9 answers total)

Best answer: The new C-mount sensor's pretty cool, but a) is seemingly sold out everywhere, b) very specific in back-focus requirements. I'm seeing it as a very specific device: almost as if they want to corner the microscope market, say. They've seemingly had real problems getting this to market: although launched recently, the hardware's marked © 2018.

While it looks entirely lovely and capable, remember it's manual focus and there's no audio. And so much depends on the lens.
posted by scruss at 12:35 PM on May 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

It feels like the kind of thing that could be useful for doing some night sky photography. I could easily see some pi based rig to track objects and take long exposures of them. Or for setting something up to take a picture of the same thing every set interval so that you could make an animation of it later on.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:50 PM on May 12, 2020

This seems like a pretty standard industrial computer vision setup, just a LOT cheaper.

You could try doing regular industrial computer vision stuff, like creating an automated fruit sorter or something. Or a LEGO sorter.
posted by GuyZero at 1:40 PM on May 12, 2020

I wonder if it could be used as part of a frame by frame DIY telecine machine, the advanced DIYers use machine vision cameras for that.
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 1:55 PM on May 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

With the right lens, a photo printer and a touchscreen, you could build a pretty cool photo booth with this, one that does snapchat style face modding or custom backgrounds.
posted by dis_integration at 2:20 PM on May 12, 2020

Best answer: Seconding astrophotography. But, it probably requires more hardware. (e.g., a telescope with a c-ring adaptor.) You could do stacked images for noise-reduction without a telescope and try to capture big faint things in the sky. But, whether or not that's fun depends on your interests. (And, you could do the same with an ordinary camera.)

Time-lapse photos are another option. At the moment, a full day of nearly empty tourist sites would appeal to me. A smart "trail camera" could be interesting. A video camera that records pigeons or humming birds? If you want to play with automation, a cat toy that only turns on when the cat is paying attention? There's no limit to the tweeking you could do on that, if you have access to a cat.
posted by eotvos at 9:02 PM on May 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

Just want to point out that 40 years ago, you could make a circuit and an LED would glow, but computers were primitive and digital cameras didn't really exist.

Today, you can still make a circuit and an LED will glow, but you can buy a Pi for the cost of a dinner out, and amazing accessories are cheap, and they snap together like LEGO, and there's this Internet thing and forums, and lots of software to do the truly hard stuff has already been written and is easily available. We live in a time of amazing possibilities.

Try it out. You might not be real good at getting it to work, and heck it could possibly even be beyond you, but the worst case scenario is that you never get it to work, in which case you still have some neat tech to stare at and be amazed by how far things have come.

More likely, however, is that in the process of learning, you find out neat stuff, maybe get the camera working, maybe find out it isn't suitable to what you want to do, but get other cool new ideas and discover other things you would like to try out. Move on, set it aside, do some other cool stuff, circle back to the camera later. Or, better yet, success! Or partial success! This is how you broaden your skills.

Half of makering and tinkering is failure and recovery. If you don't make some mistakes along the way, you're not doing it right.

So my answer to your question is, "Get one and see what you can do with it, of course!"
posted by jgreco at 5:52 AM on May 13, 2020 [2 favorites]

Best answer: There are a few posts in /r/RaspberryPi about the new camera:

today_the_lens_arrived_first_light_a_2812mm_f14/

hq_camera_long_exposure_time_lapse_test/

starfield_test_taken_with_the_new_hq_camera/
posted by wenestvedt at 12:13 PM on May 13, 2020

Baby projects and big projects. Obviously, you begin with a mini-app that can take and save a picture. Move on to adjusting focus and light level. Figuring out time lapse. By that time you are ready for something ambitious.

A possiblity I haven't seen mentioned is using the camera to take pictures in a difficult to access place like down a long pipe or at the top of a tree. Or riding a drone, or an RC sailboat.

Motion detection is tricky, I think, in that what is easy may not be that useful. Combining the cam with some other kind of triggering event could be interesting. Footstep -> turn light on -> adjust and focus cam -> take picture seems pretty challenging to me.
posted by SemiSalt at 1:20 PM on May 13, 2020