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Comment by imiric | Hacker News Reader

This looks wonderful!

I wish it could be mass produced, with some minor polish. I would throw money at it instantly. If the author is reading this, have you considered crowd sourcing it? It's great that everything is open source, but putting one together is above my skill level.

I'm desperately looking for a hackable webcam that isn't a huge privacy risk. Adding network connectivity to this project probably wouldn't be a large endeavour.

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At a guess, this would likely cost in the high-hundreds to thousands of dollars if "mass" produced.

"mass" production is really expensive, as you have to add design-for-manufacturability and design-for-testing, and account for yield loss and customer support (how happy would you be if your expensive camera appeared DOA?).

At that price-point, are there other devices on the market that already fulfill the need?

> Adding network connectivity to this project probably wouldn't be a large endeavour

lol

> At that price-point, are there other devices on the market that already fulfill the need?

No there aren't. Webcams in 2022 all have miniscule lenses/sensors paired with decade-old tech and none of the big players seem interested in producing anything higher quality.

https://reincubate.com/support/how-to/why-are-webcams-bad/

If you want high-quality video capture, your options are pretty much just (1) plug in a "real" $$$$ DSLR/mirrorless camera which will be fiddly and prone to overheating, or (2) use a cell phone as an IP camera, which will add noticeable latency and is still a tiny sensor compensated for by AI.

If this was for sale fully assembled I'd easily spend a few hundred on it. I don't care about networking, just give me plain old USB.

There is another option: You can buy relatively high quality PTZ cameras designed for low-end broadcast (HoW and legislative mostly). Some will output to USB, at the higher end you’ll need to capture SDI, NDI, or 2110.

I have a coworker with this setup and it’s easily the best video quality I’ve ever seen on a teams call even in his fairly dark room.

I’d ask you to find and share the model number they used, but I feel like it would be OOS by the time I remembered to look, then come back at 3-6X the price.

https://www.photo4less.com/product/bzgear-ptz-full-hd-1080p-...

The “professional video” category has quite a few

The insta360 sells at about €300-350 including VAT. This is $1000 EX.

Is the video quality that much better? Or is there some other feature that justifies the price?

A lot of PTZ cameras have fairly large sensors compared to webcams or phones, and unlike a phone or DSLR they’re designed to be operated continuously so they shouldn’t overheat.

> is there some other feature that justifies the price?

Physical lens zoom on most of those, with decent lens sizes, but that's not that helpful for a Zoom call, unless you've got a very weird setup.

PTZ = pan tilt zoom

SDI is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_digital_interface

NDI and 2110 are video-over-IP standards. https://renewedvision.com/blog/guide-to-video-standards-sdi-...

HoW I can't figure out.

House of Worship maybe

> low-end broadcast (HoW and legislative mostly)

I like how the original comment was kind of slagging HoW and legislative to the lower realms of quality. For the most part, that's going to be true, but there's definitely edge cases. I run in weird circles having grown up in HoW production and moving into cinematic production. One of the megachurches in town is one of Sony's flagship install locations. They always have the top end equipment that even some production houses can't get yet. The amount of money that flows through these places is flabbergasting. Their control rooms are better equipped than some of the live sports trucks I've been in. The only thing they are missing is the crew of slo-mo operators. They have a couple of seats for shaders, they have chyron ops, they have technical director, director, multiple sound boards (one for record, one for stage, one for broadcast), and just an incredible amount of gear overall. Yes, this is said from a state of jelly.

Wasn’t try to slag HoW at all[*]! Just a lot of cheap broadcast PTZs are built with more price sensitive customers in mind, who often come from legislative, corporate or house of worship. You can absolutely find high-end sophisticated productions in all those fields, but the field also has much more of a low-end (both in terms of cost and in terms of production complexity) than you’ll normally find in most more traditional broadcast verticals.

* I actual have a love for HoW as a vertical because they’re much more willing to try wild or experimental things with their production since they often have a greater tolerance for things going wrong and often have entire days of downtime between shows to tinker. This is probably part of why they’re a Sony flagship - willingness to run beta software! I know of at least one other vendor who has churches as beta testing sites…

There are a number of churches like this in the USA, yes.

But before anybody freaks out too much, it's probably worth pointing out that the median church size is 75 people.

I'm curious what the median church "experience" is of those that attend. One could imagine a single 50 million member church and two churches of 75, which would lead to a median church size of 75 but a median experience of 50 million fellow congregants.

The mean size is quite a bit larger, meaning that many people are in much larger churches, like the one discussed above.

I think in this context it's "house of worship."

A much much more expensive option?

PTZ is really nice but for normal webcam use doesn't add much.

Consumer webcams aren't the only class of device that you can plug into computers to capture images/videos.

>> At that price-point, are there other devices on the market that already fulfill the need?

> No there aren't.

There are tons of cameras that meet this need. They're "machine vision" or "scientific" cameras, google for those. Edmund Scientific has a good selection. They're ridiculously expensive for what you get if you're comparing against a webcam or a surveillance camera since they're very similar to those for >10x the price. That's the price of low volume assembly, proper support, et cetera.

Astronomical cameras and microscope cameras are affordable. Some of them mm support sensors that uses them even supports Sony's proprietary protocol.

A lot of sbc boards support MIPI CSI (iirc even RPI). Nvidia robotic modules has IO for Sony's LVDS (driver not provided though).

That's also the price of selling to a market that can afford to spend gazillions on crap cameras.

You can buy an IMX477 board with CSI output and a CSI->USB board, ~$100 combined.

Not quite a fully assembled solution but all you have to do is screw the two boards together with a few standoffs.

I haven't had a lot of success in this regard. Do you have any links I could review to do this?

For example (I just emailed Arducam about this):

The IMX477/R sensor supports Full (16:9) Binning 1080P @ 2028(H) × 1128(V) with 240hz/fps availability in a drive mode. However, no IMX477/R package I've ever found - including those from Arducam - support a CSI->USB board or similar that can drive this mode, only allowing 100 FPS maximum on most packages. (ex: https://www.uctronics.com/arducam-high-quality-complete-usb-...)

I am looking to buy a product involving the IMX477/R sensor that can drive this mode or similar 240 FPS modes, but cannot find it for the life of me despite the datasheet openly supporting this drive mode.

Forget the USB boards, they all work to the best of the USB / UVC limitations but they aren’t great. You want to hook your camera sensor up to a processor with a CSI input.

Image sensors are really just high speed ADC clocking out data, whether the data is useful or not is up to the viewer. What I’m getting at is forget FPS and think data rates.

So, you need a processor that is that can handle that data rate. The napkin math says 2K@240FPS has the same data rate as 4K@60FPS. All you need is a processor or module that can handle it and you’re golden. There are demos of the RPI pushing 1000fps (at a significant lower resolution) but you get the point.

Off the top of my head, NVIDIA jetson, imx8m mini plus, the latest allwinner V series, and a whole host of unobtainable in less than 10k qty parts all supported this. The rest is up to you.

Also, RPi is out even with 4 lanes because the CSI input doesn’t support the speed required on each lane.

You seem knowledgeable in this area. Do you know how image sensor support works? Can you attach any camera with CSI to the SBCs that you listed?

Short answer - No. The MIPI CSI-2 (CSI has been deprecated) interface is not plug and play. It requires some tuning of the handshaking between the image sensor and the receiving SOC. I think the RPI + HQ camera + libcamera is the best place to start to learn a full camera system since libcamera is open source. The software stack for a camera is a pretty large undertaking. The ISP calibration and AAA algorithms are generally closely held by various camera companies.

I've written raw frames to memory using the RPi HQ cam and RPi4 and processed them in ffmpeg/dcraw for example, so I'm familiar with that methodology. I can take it from there if I can find an IMX477 sensor (or similar) plus 4+ MIPI lanes to get full drive mode.

Any idea where to start? I am proficient enough in scripting/coding to pick up a new platform like the Jetson/Nvidia products, but no idea where to find the correct sensor+board package to actually give me the data rates I need.

Looking for 240fps/hz @ 720p in some form of greyscale, for the record.

Yeah, no, you don't need a DSLR. A point and shoot with a good sensor is more than enough. My Sony RX100 runs all day without issue and acts as a fantastic webcam via a cheap HDMI to USB adapter. Total cost used < $500.

I use an entry level mirror less DSLR, the canon M50. And I think it was about $350 and it can connect directly via USB.

> or (2) use a cell phone as an IP camera which will add noticeable latency

You can use them directly via USB using Camo or OBS - no IP needed, and that changes the latency equation.

Also, the new iOS continuity webcam feature is essentially zero latency - it's better than my good webcams.

If your need is video conferencing, relatively recent ‘insta360 link’ is _very_ good. I’ve ditched my mirrorless+HDMI setup in favor of it and haven’t seen any drop in quality.

Companion app is pretty shit though, but they seem to be working on it.

You could probably pick up those big old Cisco video conferencing cameras, which take 12V power, emit up to 1080p video over HDMI (which goes into whatever generic HDMI capture card you have) and are controlled over RS232 using Sony VISCA commands.

The cameras themselves aren't especially "hackable" but then they don't need to be, because everything going in and out is extremely well-documented.

If you just want a working camera, there are tons of industrial USB cameras on the market but probably all of them are proprietary.

If you want an open source and open hardware camera there's nothing on the market AFAIK. Of course when people discover that open source costs 10x more than proprietary they are usually no longer interested.

Industrial USB cameras use either USB3vision or proprietary protocols and are deeply cursed either way. They’re very much on the other end of the spectrum from UVC plug and play.

Hasn't been my experience working with ximea, point grey, and realsense— all these cams are at least some degree of plug and play on Linux. Obviously you end up with the vendor SW if you want more control over the shutter or something, but basic video stream capture is pretty universal.

Same, it pretty much worked without a fuss, we did a cool proof of concept demo where we used it to auto target a gimbal on a drone using an nvidia jetson running ubuntu. We got the entire software stack working together within a day or so, linux just picked up the industrial camera without a problem, but getting more control over its output required some more work. There's a whole little industry standard for high res video streams over gigabit ethernet or usb 3 that the vendors have published libraries for you can just link in your C++ project.

I am the Developer behind this camera. If you buy from mouser and try to make just 1 then Only part would be around 200 USD. If you make hundred in bath of new improved hardware, You can look at BOM cost under 100 USD. I am working on new version of this camera with totally new enclosure and PCBs as well. You will be able to buy this soon enough.

Where can we follow the development of this new project?

The real question is, how much better is the end result compared to the Pi HQ camera that sells for half as much?

That depends how stretchable your price point is. I can greatly recommend Basler cameras from my endeavours with those at work, complete C/C++/Python SDK and extremely thoroughly documented. USB and IP, HFR and High Resolution.

After working with cheapish cameras before, I won't ever look back.

There's no way stuff like this will ever be mass produced, but it's actually not that difficult to assemble this.

You'd need:

- Find components from Mouser/DigiKey/etc

- Order PCBs w/ a stencil from JLCPCB/PCBWay

- USB-C Mini Hot Plate

- Pinecil/TS100/TS101 soldering iron w/ a set of fine tips

- Soldering paste, regular solder, flux, IPA, old tooth brush, magnifying glass w/ light

- Steady hands

Then you apply solder paste over the stencil to the top side with all the chips, put components on, and reflow on the hot plate. You solder the rest of the components on the back with soldering iron and flux.

Overall the whole set is gonna cost you ~300 bucks (provided the components are not crazy expensive). But you'll have a pretty advanced electronics setup AND an open-source camera.

I have done lots of fine pitch SMT hand assembly at home with stencils etc. But I do see this has lots of BGA chips and I'm not sure how easy those are (I've never done them).

BGA seems scary, but it’s not bad: with the proper amount of solder it “self-aligns” just like any other SMD component. Even a little more precisely because of all the contact points.

AFAIK, reflowing a BGA chip without fucking it up is difficult without a temperature-controlled reflow station.

Soldering BGA is the easiest part, You just need good hotair. While soldering connectors are hardest. They melt , do not self alging and many other problems

Yeah, reflowing BGA is a whole different beast. You have to completely remove and reapply all solder but then that’s not really “reflowing” that’s just assembling.

I am the Developer behind this camera. I have assembled cameras the exact way you have described. If you buy from mouser and try to make just 1 then Only part would be around 200 USD.

I was wondering about this comment on the article:

> IMX335 is also MIPI CSI sensor, So it can be added, I just did a quick search and found sensor itself is not available for purchase but you can buy IMX335 based cameras pretty cheap and get camera sensor out of it.

Do you desolder the sensor (and how would you do that)? Or does the sensor still needs to be on its original PCB?

Would be great to see this n a crowdsupply campaign.

I am the Developer behind this camera. Camera as is not very productionable because of manufacturing related issues.

There will be Third revision of this camera coming in few months. I am working on absolute new hardware with lots of improvement in image quality.

Consider the OpenMV[1] camera, I have several of these and find them very useful for everything from simple vision control for robots to automated face detection. I turned one into a license plate reader and had it identify plates that drove down my street. All very versatile.

[1] https://openmv.io/products/openmv-cam-h7-plus

OpenMV seems to be targeting completely different use cases where the image never leaves the camera (because OpenMV doesn't have any usable I/O to get video out of the board).

The OpenCV OAK series of cameras are fun to play with: https://store.opencv.ai/

Actually, is there any open webcam for home use that doesn't seen all the recordings to some 3rd party? I'm interested too.

There are plenty of cheap-ish commodity cameras that use ONVIF to stream video over a LAN. That by itself doesn't guarantee that they aren't also exfiltrating the data somewhere, but you can put them on a firewalled VLAN.

you can make a webcam from a raspberry pi (a case is harder)

or you can plug in one or more usb webcams, some of which have good cases.

Some of the random-commercial-thing-from-China home security cams have open-source replacement firmwares.

I wonder if it could be adjusted so that it can be ordered assembled through a place like JLCPCB. Then you could get the PCBs, order your choice of 3D printed enclosure, add the lens, assemble it and be done.

I'm desperately looking for a hackable webcam that isn't a huge privacy risk

RPi is no good for that? If they are available.

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