Custom Raspberry Pi HQ camera gets 40x optical zoom lens

With the introduction of motorized zoom lenses, the next logical step was matching the sensor board. Sure there are countless suitable sensors from various manufacturers like Sony semiconductors, Onsemi, Aptina, and many more. But lack of good support from the SOC side suggested starting from IMX477. It is a reasonably modern 12M image sensor used by many single-board computers like Raspberry Pi, NVIDIA Jetson, and others.

Raspberry Pi locks cameras with a security chip and prohibits non-authorized cameras with standard boards. Luckily this security feature is not used by compute modules. Motorized lenses have dedicated, and in most cases, unique direct mount features. So a custom camera module is a must, thus introducing the IMX477 MIPI CSI2 camera board.

This is the first of a few upcoming camera modules. Note multiple mounting features – this allows single-board use with many lenses.

Features of the lens kit:

Lens optical train – 3 stepper motors for Zoom, Focus and compensate lens groups
Iris
Two optical filters: IR CUT and NIR
Reference optical train elements
Runs on GRBL firmware ported on STM32 CPU with four axis motion planner

Using the camera with Raspberry Pi compute module

There is a great resource about the IMX477 camera on Raspberry Pi pages, feel free to learn how to control and use it from Raspberry Pi. Below is a simple recipe for streaming real-time video from RPI to a computer.

Run on computer first

gst-launch-1.0 udpsrc port=5004 ! "application/x-rtp,media=(string)video,clock-rate=(int)90000,encoding-name=(string)JPEG,a-framerate=(string)40.000000,a-framesize=(string)1280-720,payload=(int)26" ! rtpjpegdepay ! decodebin ! autovideosink

Run on RPI as a second step

# Install librariessudo apt -y install libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev# Start streamerraspivid -t 0 -cd MJPEG -awb greyworld -mm average -w 2028 -h 1520 -fps 30 -b 132000000 -o - | gst-launch-1.0 fdsrc ! "image/jpeg,framerate=30/1" ! jpegparse ! rtpjpegpay ! udpsink host=<COMPUTER_IP> port=5004

Control the lens

The SCE2-SDK control software can be forked from GitHub. Python code allows code reuse on many operating systems and keeps it human-readable, thus open for customizations.

Download and install https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/ (tested with Python 3.10 on Win10 and Python 3.8.10 on Win7)
- Check Add Python 3.8 to PATH in the first setup window!
- Restart computer
Clone (or download zip archive) from GitHub repository: https://github.com/Kurokesu/SCE2-SDK in preferred directory
Open console at 03_lens_tester_gui folder
Install dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Run demo with command

python main.py

Results

And finally, demonstration video cycling through a few presets and changing filters.

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