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Optocam Zero: a Pi Zero based digital camera made using off the shelf components

217 points by iamnothere

by Fwirt

16 subcomments

It's a shame that, being based on a full-blown Linux SBPC, it has an absolutely unacceptable boot time for a camera. 22 seconds. I can have my iPhone camera out and ready to capture an ephemeral moment of child's play in under 3 seconds, most commercial cameras boot in seconds as well. A film camera can be ready to go the second the lens cap is off. 22 seconds is an eternity in the world of photography. It's a shame that the SoC the Raspberry Pi line is based on has no kernel support (or IIRC hardware support) for S3 or anything similar.

by MoonWalk

5 subcomments

No disrespect to the project here, of course, but I'm wondering why there's no truly high-quality camera for Pis. I have the so-called "high-quality camera" and it still blows. I use it to monitor my 3-D printer with OctoPi, and that's about what it's good for.

by crossbody

4 subcomments

Sounds like a fun project.
Honest question: why would one switch from a much more capable "carry everywhere" smartphone camera to this? Especially since phone is truly carry always & everywhere and that computational processing squeezes out insane amount of photo quality from already excellent phone cameras.

by GL26

0 subcomment

This is very cool, it would be huge if this camera could go on fields "traditional cameras" didn't go in, and iphones cannot give. Like an inbetween both where you can add an objective, and send photos to your phone via BLE or something. This would allow for a "professional camera" where you can edit your photos you just took

by Shalomboy

1 subcomments

I loved this project the first time it came around. As much as I wanted to build it out myself, I was shocked at how much the components actually cost to put together. It definitely seems like an improvement on the charmera though, so it all comes out in the wash.

by kristianp

0 subcomment

I wonder why this doesn't use the 4608x2592 resolution the sensor is capable of. It produces cropped 2592x2592 images. Stylistic choice, hopefully not too hard to reconfigure?
Edit s/camera/sensor/

by ge96

0 subcomment

The one I was impressed with that came out recently is this one https://github.com/Yutani140x/saturnix-camera this one (optocam) is cool it has heart/soul on an aesthetic perspective

by j4k0bfr

0 subcomment

Cool project. Would be nice to have some unfiltered example photos to gauge the sensor quality w.o. more googling.

by poolnoodle

1 subcomments

The photos aren't half bad. I was expecting something along the lines of the first cameras on mobile phones.

by walrus01

0 subcomment

The output reminds me a little bit in fuzziness of the earliest 640x480 digital cameras from the mid to late 90s that stored images on a 4MB compactflash card.

by rsamtravis

0 subcomment

Huh. 90 minutes of use isn't very much. Is the battery easy to swap out or do I have to unscrew the case to do it?

by sciencesama

0 subcomment

by VaporJournalAPP

0 subcomment

0 subcomment