On Demo, a $25 1080p Camera Module For Raspberry Pi 101
hypnosec writes "The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a new add-on – a camera module that will enable the credit card sized computer to snap pictures as well as record 1080p videos. Showcased by RS Components at the Elecontrica 2012 in Germany [watch video here] the £16 (apprx) module will be equipped with a 5MP sensor and will plug into the otherwise unused CSI pins of the Pi. The camera module's board is still in prototype stage and is expected to reach production sometime soon. Liz Upton, Executive Director of the Foundation said in a blog post, 'We've a (very) little way to go before we're able to send it out to manufacture.' According to Upton, testing slots have been booked in December to check on electromagnetic radiations from the ribbon cable."
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I checked 4 stores, they were all in the 4 week range
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Which means if you actually ordered 4 weeks ago you'd have it by now.
'There was once a CPU so popular that no one ever ordered it any more'.
Re:Oh did you fix your supply problem? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.coolcomponents.co.uk/catalog/raspberry-model-p-1032.html [coolcomponents.co.uk]
one left, hurry!
Seriously, Element 14 is a good alternative. But RS were utter rubbish at it!
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That's just a marketing come-on to get you to order.
Once you order, you are informed of the standard 4-week wait...and if you complain, they just tell you somebody else got the one in stock just seconds before you did...
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Nah, their stock levels appear to be accurate. Bought two from them recently*, and they're active on twitter.
Ah well you've missed the boat ... someone bought the last one!
*Just before the upgraded Sony units were released.
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It also depends on where you are, here in the UK I can find three suppliers who claim to have stock but the US situation doesn't appear anywhere near as rosy.
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if you give it a good solid 5v (or even 5.1v) then it will...
oh wait.
nevermind.
Re:Oh did you fix your supply problem? (Score:5, Informative)
I ordered 20 for my classroom last Friday. They arrived on Wednesday. What supply problem?
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you need to understand what biggot means
and yes people are idiots for following instructions provided by the designers
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the problem that every store I check has a 4 week back order
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Oh grow up and stop the whining hyperbole.
I ordered mine a month ago ( on a whim no less) and i got it in 3 days of ordering.
And thats the new rev 2.0 board with 512MB RAM. Ordered from Element14.
Supply issue my ass.
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your ass is right, every store is on at least a 4 week back order, glad you happened to buy one when the sparse shipment managed to show the fuck up
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I want to be able to buy one without waiting a month, thought that was clear
just cause some hobby shop near you happened to have one, doesn't mean they are available
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I ordered two monday last week and got them friday.
This monday I went by the local computer store to pickup some more SD cards and they had over 20 on the shelf in bubble packs, so I picked up my 3rd.
Some of the distributers even have over night shipping for $30, including the one I used, which had hundreds in stock.
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every single shop I checked has a 4 week backorder, glad you were lucky
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I bought my first two from CPC http://cpc.farnell.com/ [farnell.com]
Unfortunately their "check stock" link isn't loading for me, so assuming the worst they may be sold out now.
Checking eBay though, here are 4 of them including a very nice case, for $35 each using buy-it-now (not an auction)
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Raspberry-Pi-Model-B-ABS-Case-NEW-U-S-Manufacture-and-Seller-HDMI-/150928193043?pt=US_Computer_Cases&hash=item2324057613 [ebay.com]
I admit it's getting annoying searching ebay, with all the new case sellers that have p
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*Listing is for CASE ONLY
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I ordered 5 from CPC last week and got them the next morning. This was the bundle with case, debian squeeze on a 4GB SD and PSU, and they're still showing 'in stock'. CPC have always been reliable for me. I've been using them since they were an electronics spares shop in the 80s with a 4-page photocopied stock list. They've grown to a 1000+ page printed catalogue selling just about anything electronic / electric / officy and I can't fault them. They were bought by Farnell at some point in the past decade,
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I too was very happy with my CPC order. I placed the order on a Monday afternoon and recieved them Friday, so only 4 days total from UK to the USA.
Right now they are showing having units in stock. The moment I checked before, they must have been overloaded with traffic with all the recent Pi announcements. /. if someone was serious about purchasing one or not.
I never heard anything back from the original person I replied to about if he finally found one. One can never know on
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OK, I don't know what shipping to US is (mine was free in UK) but RIGHT HERE is an answer to us supply problem (I'm assuming CPC don't restrict supplies by country). I'd mod you up (got the points) but I've already posted here (plus I guess I wouldn't want to dry up the UK supply!). Happy RPI hacking. Enjoy your made-in-Wales RPI!
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Ah my mistake, that ebay listing was just another case seller.
Looks like the actual Pis are all going up in price, $50 or more. Not sure if you wanted to spend that much yet
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(Ignore my other reply)
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No problems, I felt the same way once I noticed and had to do the same double-reply thing.
Sucks I couldn't edit it or even take it back. With so few left I wanted the parent poster to have a good shot at it.
Never a good deed goes unpunished I guess
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Ordered on Monday, getting this Monday. One week is acceptable.
Or if I'm willing to pay a fair chunk more at a Maplin I can have one in my hand this very day.
First 1080p Cameras Cost A Bunch... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Economy of scale.
Beside, I'm pretty sure that the captors used on those cameras are still much higher quality than what 25$ will get you.
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Um...the quality of the videos this produces would not even by close to what a 100k film camera produces.
Resolution != image quality
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It's still better than anything Lucas has done in the last 30 years.
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Yeah, high resoloution CCDs and the electronics to drive them at film framerates have come down as semiconductor fabrication has improved and economys of scale have increased.
Having said that this is far from comparable with a proffesional tv or movie camera for a couple of reasons.
Firstly due to the lack of any high speed network or storage interfaces on the Pi and the lack of CPU power for custom processing you are pretty much forced to use the h.264 compressor in the GPU on the video before you can store
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It still flips me out that smartphones do texture mapping, multi-texturing at that, when just 15 years ago, that would have required a $10,000 graphics board on a desktop.
Almost sounds like the title of a crappy TV show (Score:2)
Raspberry Pi: CSI
You get 1080p video... (Score:1, Interesting)
... compressed into an H264 stream and then you're stuck with a CPU that makes first generation Atom netbooks look fast. The Raspberry Pi is yesteryear's phone hardware without the shiny case, folks. It's SLOW.
Re:You get 1080p video... (Score:5, Insightful)
And in other news, Arduino cards have a 16MHz 8-bit processor with mere kilobytes of both RAM and flash. And despite making a 1980s suitcase computer look fast, they've proven themselves to be fully capable of running all sorts of awesome things that hobbyists have been using them for.
What's your point again?
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The Raspberry Pi definitely isn't speedy, but all kinds of things are possible with it. Where an Arduino has difficulty doing any image processing at all, a Pi will run OpenCV and do plenty of things deeply appropriate to robotics and as
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You've probably got enough CPU power to detect skin tone, which could be useful for some applications.
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The point is that the Raspberry Pi is much too slow to do anything with the video except storing it, viewing it unmodified or sending it somewhere else.
Then your point is utterly irrelevant.
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If only the slowness was the problem. The Pi may not be quite as fast at kernel compilation as a 486DX40 was back in the day, but that is not a major annoyance in practice.
The complete lack of I/O is the problem. Ok, that is not quite correct, the Output part is pretty decent as long as you stick to HDMI, but the Input part is useless. Everything, even ethernet, is USB connected, and the USB controller is broken.
At least this camera is not using USB, so you can use the Pi as some kind of video transformatio
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If only the slowness was the problem. The Pi may not be quite as fast at kernel compilation as a 486DX40 was back in the day, but that is not a major annoyance in practice.
If you boot from the SD but have root on something faster (a high-speed flash drive, or a USB HDD) then it's faster than that was back in the day.
The complete lack of I/O is the problem. Ok, that is not quite correct, the Output part is pretty decent as long as you stick to HDMI, but the Input part is useless. Everything, even ethernet, is USB connected, and the USB controller is broken.
Why haven't I had a problem with the USB? I've certainly used it.
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There were some major problems when mixing certain low-speed (10 Mbps) devices with high-speed devices, but that problem was basically fixed with a device firmware update and maybe a kernel update. I haven't had any problems since telling my Pi to update itself.
That said, last I checked, the version of Raspbian that you can actually download in image form was way out of date and did not include those fixes. So you do have to exp
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Isochronous transfers are terminally broken, and non-isochronous transfers work only by luck and retransmissions.
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Translation: audio and video devices over USB don't work properly. (And many of them do; AFAIK, the problems are specific to USB 2.0 devices, and probably only in the presence of USB 1.1 devices like keyboards.)
Compared with where things were a few months ago, that's a near-miraculous state. The prior state could best be described as "I plugged in a USB 1.x device through a USB 2.0 powered hub, and Ethernet stopped working until I unplugged the keyboard." :-)
As I understand it, many of the problems stem
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AFAIK, the problems are specific to USB 2.0 devices, and probably only in the presence of USB 1.1 devices like keyboards.
Great, specific to USB 2.0, that means I can do USB at 11Mbps.
That particular breakage does not have anything to do with the presence of USB 1.1 devices, although those are broken for other reasons.
The USB host controller is just a piece of junk which needs constant hand holding. Plan A is apparently to run a special high priority IRQ handler which overrides everything else. Plan B is to let the graphics core babysit the USB host controller.
They can blame the latency of the rest of the kernel all they want;
What is up with all the advertisments ? (Score:3, Insightful)
What is even ironically that the Liz Upton doesn't like Slashdot (look it up) or its community or anybody that has some valid criticism. Seeing how many advertisement Slashdot post it seems just a ridiculous thing to create buzz and post advertisement for people who in all honesty doesn't like your community. But then again sometimes I have the feeling seeing how things are getting edited, even the editors don't like this community... . So let me ask you this honest question timothy, why do you hate us so much ?
Why no attention for other open source products that may even have a more open attitude because openness doesn't only stop with hardware or software... . They ban people on ridiculous grounds [element14.com] (read the examples and make your own mind up if those bans are valid) I even saw people from the RPI foundation attacking luc verhoeven (of the lima driver) because he pointing (rightfully) that their whole Open Source GPU drivers are just PR BS. I have seen companies or groups abusing or misrepresenting open source slaughtered for less.
Sorry to come over as pissed, but it aggravates the hell out of me that projects like these [j1nx.nl] gets ignored when they raise money to create a really fully open system and there is so much non news posted about the RPI. I find these kind of projects a lot more interesting for another RPI add on.
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I'd like to go support that project, but R-Pi is 1/4 the price (well, plus shipping which was exorbitant in my case, but anyway) and it's too hard to get excited when there's Dual-core gumsticks for fifty bucks.
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Sorry to come over as pissed, but it aggravates the hell out of me that projects like these [j1nx.nl] gets ignored when they raise money to create a really fully open system and there is so much non news posted about the RPI. I find these kind of projects a lot more interesting for another RPI add on.
http://slashdot.org/~SilenceBE/submissions [slashdot.org]
Hmm, looks blank. Can you complain?
Some tantalizing use cases ... (Score:1, Interesting)
- Part of a car-puter system; dash cam / dome cam.
- Home security system cam
- video conf system
- video input for rPi-controlled robots
There are some great cases now sized for the Raspberry Pi; would be cool to see the physical equivalent of Linux distros, with rPi cases sized for / sold with various accessories, and a working OS included, including apps appropriate for some particular use. (Things like Zoneminder, say.)
- Lego-based plans (diagrams, lego)
- a case that includes this camera module (or equival
Re:Some tantalizing use cases ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actual use cases I've seen for the Raspberry Pi that I've done myself and seen others do:
- Plug the Rpi into a LAN, and connect it to the serial console of a piece of equipment with a USB to serial cable - old router, telephone equipment, radio broadcast transmitter, fill in the blank. SSH into the thing if you need to get at the console instead of doing a site trip.
- Plug a few sensors into it, run it off a 12V car battery and a +5V automotive USB adapter, and leave it somewhere to log data onto the SD card or a USB stick.
- Plug a USB hard drive into it, and use it as a low power torrent downloader, instead of keeping your desktop PC powered up when you're not home.
It's a tiny, $25 linux machine. Possibilities are endless.
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AdaFruit makes an enclosure that attaches to the wall-mount screw holes of a monitor, that you snap the Pi in. Perfect for an XBMC setup.
I've also interfaced mine to an 8 port relay board and a USB camera. The relays are controllable from levers in my Minecraft server, and the camera is viewable on the web.
Next step is to setup a christmas light scene controllable by the other players online, hopefully in time for chrismas!
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- Plug the Rpi into a LAN, and connect it to the serial console of a piece of equipment with a USB to serial cable - old router, telephone equipment, radio broadcast transmitter, fill in the blank. SSH into the thing if you need to get at the console instead of doing a site trip.
Does that actually work now? I know that for ages USB-to-serial cables were completely broken due to bugs in the USB controller on the Pi, and the RasPi Foundation publicly blamed all the problems on people using the wrong power supplies and banned anyone who suggested they should perhaps be a bit more forward with this information. (USB keyboards and mice were also horribly unreliable due to different controller bugs.)
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Actually, it would be super-excellent to make a RCX-like brick out of an R-Pi... although I'd probably settle for a MSP or an Arduino
So basically a sub $50 IP security camera (Score:1)
Sweet, I am super psyched to see what else comes out this giant little platform.
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That link backs up the point of how hostile Pi/Broadcom are to OSS, it doesn't refute it.
You're conflating Pi and Broadcom. Pi foundation is friendly to open source. Broadcom isn't. Somewhere in the middle lies Raspberry Pi, the product.
On the other hand, any claim that the platform is fully open in any particulars is a load of dingo's kidneys.
I still just want Android. They said they had it working. Then nothing, no answers to any questions, just the occasional flip comment telling someone that their concerns are unfounded. I bought the thing only after their announcement, on the assumption th
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As far as I know the power and ethernet design issues have been more or less solved, and now it's just USB :)
I am grumpy that the board didn't receive more testing as well, but as I have posted elsewhere on here, I feel I have only myself to blame. I should have known better than to expect it to work properly in the first revision.
I sure would like to know why they've not released ICS for R-Pi when they claimed to have it working so very long ago, but they won't say. It's the lack of openness in this suppos
100% closed source (Score:1)
CSI connector is 100% closed, all code sitting in a blob. JamesH from RPi foundation rejected any pleads basically stating users are TOO CLUELESS to figure out setting up image sensor so they locked it down.
Additionally they will be selling $5 cellphone image sensor at $15 and you wont be able to use any other one. (I wouldnt be surprised if they got special revision from Aptina just to lock it down harder).
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It's an OmniVision part, but yes, it seems to be all closed as usual. I've never understood why image sensor documentation is so locked down.
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the sensor part is open and trivial to set up/communicate with, the communication port on RPI is closed black box
Re:100% closed source (Score:4, Informative)
Yup, you are too clueless, because you obviously have no idea of the complexity involved. It takes man-months to really get a camera driver working properly, then man years to tune the sensor ISP to actually produce decent pictures. You get all that work, plus PCB development, for $25. And it is the standard OV sensor, not a specific 'locked down' version - you don't need locked down sensors because the damn things are all bloody different anyway.
But actually Jamesh didnt say that was the reason the GPU blob is locked down at all. The GPU has its own firmware which is closed course, the camera driver and tuning are in that firmware, so are locked down as a result of the entire GPU source being closed, not because people are not experienced enough to make the sensor work.
But full marks for FUD - well done.
I love the RasPi... (Score:2)
I don't have one yet as I am more of a user than a hacker, hobbyist or developer, or whatever, but I am keen on putting together a kit which is known to work.
My dream? Car computer!
I want one of these to collect ALL SORTS of data... OBD2 data, environment data (temp, barametric, humidity, GPS and ALL that) and to put it out in some form which can be displayed on a device like an android tablet, web interface or even one of those USB display devices for an awesome digital dashboard.
I don't know why, but I l
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The RPi might be a bit underpowered for what you want to do with it, especially the Android idea. And IIRC, they even haven't been able to port Android yet.
Better choice (albiet more expensive) would be a Beagle Board. http://beagleboard.org/ [beagleboard.org]
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Refresh rate? (Score:2)
Until they can quote a refresh rate, I don't care.
If they later report that this can stream lightly-compressed 1080p at full frame rate, I will become very interested, but I'm guessing it won't offer any real advantages.
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Can do 1080p30 at upto about 30Mbits/s encoded stream, 720p60 at the same. Or lower resolutions at higher frames rates up to about 120fps.
Ultimate Time Lapse camera? (Score:2)
With a good enclosure and some good storage, not to mention a hefty battery, I can see this spending lots of time taking time lapse photos for days and even weeks on end! I can't wait to see how its packaged, and I hope the lens doesn't stink.
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What good is a Raspberry Pi camera accessory when you can't get a Raspberry Pi?
There are now at least three vendors in the UK with the raspberry Pi in stock. Things don't seem so rosy in the US right now unfortunately though newark claim "1321 Expected to ship 26 Nov, 2012"
The foundation has its priorities all wrong. If they put half as much effort into the supply problems as they do on this neverending astroturfing
The trouble is with something like the Pi you can't just buy the components off the shelf. The manufacturing partners have to order the SoCs, wait for them to be produced and shipped to the PCB assembly factory, then get the boards made and shipped from where they produce them to where they want to sell them. That t
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It has now been long enough, and the demand has been high enough, that this should be irrelevant.
Look, I know how hard it is to get stuff fabbed. I handled the manufacturing for the P112 project. We use an OBSOLETE component in the mix, one that the only sources are "new old stock" and floor sweepings.
We were able to go from Gerbers to shipping in about a month. Granted, I live in the Pacific Northwest and have access to an awesome board fab and board stuffer.
With the quantity of JIT vendors out there, a
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I handled the manufacturing for the P112 project.
You mean the one that was recently on kickstarter? The one that was talking about 150 units?
We were able to go from Gerbers to shipping in about a month.
I can believe that. Presumablly all the parts you used (other than the PCB) were bought from stock. Some of them may have been tricky to find but once found presumablly buying them was reasonablly quick.
It has now been long enough, and the demand has been high enough, that this should be irrelevant.
I'd agree it's taken an annoyingly long time and that both the RPF and the manufacturing partners have made mistakes which have delayed things.
Still the backlog basically boils down to "how much are the companies who
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I ordered 5 RPi's from Newark on 11/17, and the latest status on the web site is "Expected Ship Date 10 Dec 2012". Naturally they said they were in stock the moment I ordered them.
Oh Great...now I gotta redesign my lego case (Score:2)
Granted, I did go a bit overboard in the powered USB Hub department, what with 28 ports and all, but it almost fit within the confines of a 32x32 lego plate
http://imageshack.us/a/img811/6440/img0191nq.jpg [imageshack.us]
http://imageshack.us/a/img59/7307/img0194ct.jpg [imageshack.us]