Multiple Cameras

[7890tom7890]

Okay so the premise of this post is to discover a way to use multiple cameras simultaneously with the HAT and have the cluster compute the data into some usable appplication.

I've seen a product called the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, it has 2 CSI inputs, and can use a program to give the board a sense of "depth perception".
This would be an incredible benefit to anyone designing a robot (as is my case) or a machine that requires the ability to "see" in 3 dimensions.

Would there be ways to make this a reality? Would it be possible to have the ClusterHAT replicate the properties of the Compute Module and provide a 3D depth perception?

[Chris Burton]

Hi, 

You could probably use a camera on the Pi Zero to create network stream and then send this over the USB network connection (taking into account the bandwidth available) to the controller and then process the data there but obviously this would be slower than using 2 cameras directly plugged into the same CPU processing.

Chris.

[Seabass]

Are you saying that there is not a way for this set up to collect input from the 3 camera's at the same time?

Sorry this might seem off topic, I am also interested in processing the signal of multiple cameras at once, although my end result is more of a fine arts application.

I am trying to build a multiangle camera that has at least 4 different camera's pointing at different perspectives.

This is for now a still camera.

The way I understood clusterhat, I would be using one pi with a clusterhat + 4 pi zeros each connected to their own cameras.

My Questions are:

Is this set up even possible? (I found this solution when I asked google "is it possible to connect 4 camera's to raspberry pi?")

Will it be possible for the main pi to trigger all 4 of the cameras on the pi zeros at the same time? (the trigger will be a sensor)

Will it be possible for me to get the output of the individual cameras have to be stored by the 4 zeros storage or will it be stored by main Pi?

What is the scalability of this thing? would I be able to daisy chain more clusterhats together to make an even more complex system?

lastly should I just make a new thread for this question?

Thanks

S

[Chris Burton]

Hi,

On Thursday, 8 November 2018 19:19:25 UTC, Seabass wrote:

Are you saying that there is not a way for this set up to collect input from the 3 camera's at the same time?

As I've explained in other threads here it depends what you mean by "same time".

 

Sorry this might seem off topic, I am also interested in processing the signal of multiple cameras at once, although my end result is more of a fine arts application.

I am trying to build a multiangle camera that has at least 4 different camera's pointing at different perspectives.

This is for now a still camera.

The way I understood clusterhat, I would be using one pi with a clusterhat + 4 pi zeros each connected to their own cameras.

My Questions are:

Is this set up even possible? (I found this solution when I asked google "is it possible to connect 4 camera's to raspberry pi?")

You can connect up to 5 cameras with the ClusterHAT+4xPiZero+RPi3 if you don't mind bending the cable on the Controller Pi a bit (or use bigger spacers + header to give more clearance).

 

Will it be possible for the main pi to trigger all 4 of the cameras on the pi zeros at the same time? (the trigger will be a sensor)

Within a few ms to seconds is most likely achievable but there will be delays due to Linux and the GPU doing their own thing and if you communicate over USB there are delays in that too (it can only talk to one device at a time) which won't be constant/predictable as you'll have over any network.

 

Will it be possible for me to get the output of the individual cameras have to be stored by the 4 zeros storage or will it be stored by main Pi?

With the Cluster HAT you end up with 5 networked computers so you would need to have some code to either make it either available over the network or to store via network storage on the controller Pi (NFS), etc.

 

What is the scalability of this thing? would I be able to daisy chain more clusterhats together to make an even more complex system?

 

You can't add too many more USB Gadget devices to a single Controller Pi (due to hardware limitations of the RPi USB controller) - but you can have multiple Controller RPi+ClusterHAT+4PiZero on the same Ethernet network. You just need to reconfigure the Pi Zeros to use a different MAC address (you can do this using the "intermediate" software instructions to rename them from p1-p4 to p11-p14, p21-p24, etc. for each controller Pi).

 

If you want to go a little crazy with it then I made a "Desktop Adaptor" (https://twitter.com/burtyb/status/996887677776662528) for the Cluster HAT which has 32 Pi Zeros (on 8 Cluster HAT) but currently it must be connected to a desktop PC (due to the USB limitations on the RPi USB controller) :).

lastly should I just make a new thread for this question?

It's normally best to start a new thread for a new question :).

Chris.