64MP Hawk-eye Autofocus Camera Module for Raspberry Pi?

Hi all,

Looking to get a camera to go with lightburn - I can see the ‘official’ lightburn cameras are lagging behind somewhat (ie only 5-8mp whereas plenty of folks talking about 12 - 16 mp).

Was looking at this 64mp arducam - any reasons this wouldn’t work for lightburn?

There are a few reasons such a camera wouldn’t work. LightBurn doesn’t run on a Pi, full stop. As such, any use of a Pi Camera would involve some incredibly complex software to make a Pi behave like a USB webcam. That throws the cost and mounting of a Pi itself into the “part of the headache”, and on a gantry it’s less than trivial to tuck a Pi away somewhere safe.

Secondly, at that resolution, very few devices are capable of emulating a camera. Last I checked, the Pi’s OTG functionality is only 2.0, meaning it’d only have a tiny fraction of the bandwidth needed to run at those specs.

You can use cameras other than ours with LightBurn; you don’t need to purchase a LightBurn Camera. That said, they do still need to be a: a USB webcam of some kind (not networked), b: default to the resolution you’d like to use in LightBurn, and c: hopefully not have errata that cause it to behave sporadically with our camera’s controls in LightBurn.

I’m not sure whether it’s just because if somebody tells me something is impossible “full stop” I accept that as a challenge, but you can get an adapter that takes that 15 pin outpuut from a module like this and converts it to serial (USB 2.0) at which point it basically just IS a webcam and provided Lightburn itself can handle the resolution I don’t see this as particularly challengingm let alone impossible (although I have not done it yet, nor see any real benefit since my 8MP gets me about as close as I need to be, I have never been able to tune it over the entire bed of any of my machines better than the 8MP resolution affords.)
Secondly, even if you DID need to add a Pi to the mix (and I dont think you do) you would not have to mouint it on the gantry- again, that 15 pin ribbon or round cable is available several meters long (like, 15 feet at least) which for most machines means you could locate the Pi anywhere.
A bigger issue for those open frame units is making a housing, I SLA printed a custom housing for one of my lasers and added a perspex flush window and interior o-ring seal and an airtight gland on the (custom) cable so smoke and ash and bits of crud can’t get into the camera- you really need a flush window over the lens so it doesn’t collect every type of smoke and contaminant from the laser, at least if you are working with higher power or air assist or materials like solid surface that blow fine quartz dust all over the inside of the enclosure.

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Here:
This one supports 4032x, I am not sure if you can get higher resolution out of it by continuing to drop frame rate, frame rate necessary for using LB should be very very low, 2 FPS should suffice.

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Drats, should have known better to hit the nerves of an engineer… Please, genuinely, prove me wrong; it’d be really cool to see someone pull this off :slight_smile:

(more seriously, wasn’t my intent to be so absolutist and try to shut it down, should have known better than firing from the hip.)

The only concern I’d have is that the CSI cables at higher bandwidth aren’t perfect; my understand is that they’re similar to PCIe in terms of timing requirements, and PCIe extenders have a bit of a reputation for being shoddy.

I didn’t know the Pi Hut had USB adapters, that’s neat! That, in theory, would work for your goal, and with that context, I’ll eat my words. It’s possible to use some Pi cameras over USB (which is for some personal projects an enormous convenience, so ty for that!)

Best,
Kim

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