Create a High-Speed Raspberry Pi Camera for Just $6 Using Nothing But Software

Taking high frame rate video or filming in slow motion is becoming a standard feature found on some of the higher-end smartphones as of…

Cabe Atwell
5 years ago

Taking high frame rate video or filming in slow motion is becoming a standard feature found on some of the higher-end smartphones as of late. Watching the most mundane objects, such as water balloons or fireworks, spin or fall, can have a remarkable visual impact over using 60 FPS video. Besides using the latest flagship smartphones, most high-speed video is shot using expensive camera setups that can cost thousands of dollars, which most of us can’t afford, but software consultant and developer Robert Elder was able to design a high-speed camera using just $6.

No special equipment is involved in Elder’s design, which uses a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and a V1 or V2 Pi camera (hence the $6).

During the initial setup process, a Raspberry Pi V2 camera was plugged into the Raspberry Pi. After the install was completed, the camera was switched to a V1 camera, which also worked without further steps, so the install steps here should cover bother camera types. The V1 camera that was tested uses the OV5647 image sensor, and the V2 camera tested uses the IMX219 sensor.”

The setup process involves using Hermann Stamm-Wilbrandt’s modified version of raspiraw, specifically a fork of raspiraw, which captures RAW image frames and timestamp metadata from the camera sensor and ports it to the Raspberry Pi’s onboard memory. A fork of dcraw is also used to turn the RAW image frames into .tiff files, while FFmpeg and the captured frame timestamp metadata turn the image sequence into a video. Brown has provided a detailed walkthrough of his build, including links to the software repositories, on his project page for those who would like a cheap high-speed camera

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