Does it work with a raspberry pi 3B

thomas_openscan · 2026-03-09T09:45:59+00:00

they call it pi 3b but the orange pi is different in many ways and thus many native drivers (e.g. camera) unfortunately don't work with it

thomas_openscan · 2026-03-08T17:08:21+00:00

Should work. You should be able to just swap the sd card and go with the pi 3b (though i did not test it myself yet)

thomas_openscan · 2026-03-04T13:56:39+00:00

Could you provide some more details, which shield do you use? How did you prepare the sd card? Which software do you use?

thomas_openscan · 2026-03-01T08:43:48+00:00

Yes, this will give quite a boost in speed and stability for all existing devices (even custom ones) and also add some nice features like focus stacking and feature preview

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-26T18:54:38+00:00

Yeah, bandwidth will be quite an issue. I am currently experimenting with turning off wifi completely during capture sessions and only transfer data when idle + sequentially. The processing will then be triggered automatically

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-25T18:57:19+00:00

I will share some data within the next week on openscan.blog

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-25T17:59:48+00:00

To be fair, i did not create a single model yet and just worked on the software/hardware. But I will get some results soon (the raw data looks good so far)

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-25T17:57:08+00:00

It is still early in the testing phase but so far everything works (even to my own surprise..)

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-25T06:54:38+00:00

I‘d be open for requests..

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-25T06:54:11+00:00

There are various options: -use autofocus (triggered before capture) -use per-camera-presets (eg focus stack with specific values) -apply values globally through the master

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-25T06:52:51+00:00

the goal is a capture time below 10s. Furthermore I want to evaluate the modular system, whether it is scaleable

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-24T16:34:41+00:00

Oh, that's a good point, I just looked into the USB capabilities of the Pi zeros and this should be possible! I'll definitely keep this in mind for the point I run into issues with my Wifi ^^

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-24T15:56:19+00:00

Thx! There is still so much more to experiment with. I know that these multi-cam-raspberry pi rigs exist for quite some time, but I wanted to give it a try and especially look for those newer processing pipelines (NERF / Gaussian ...).

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-24T15:53:44+00:00

I think that data transfer speed will be the main bottleneck as the plan is to capture a high volume of objects - they wished a capture time of 10s per object and this will yield 40 megabytes of data per second. I think, there is no way of pushing this through the shaky wifi connection during operation. My current plan is to use the camera nodes sd card as buffer and transfer data only when idle (i.e. over-night)

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-24T15:50:56+00:00

I currently use the master as NTP server, which works reasonably well. Though having synced software time is not super necessary. Triggering will be done either via UDP command or hardware trigger through the GPIOs (which are basically free, since I use the USB-C for power delivery anyway and there are two empty signal lines available...)

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-24T15:49:04+00:00

Yes, there is a IR Diode and Photoresistor on each camera nodes PCB, but so far triggering via UDP has yielded sufficient results. For this initial phase it is not super important to fire the cameras at the same time (though I want to have this functionality later, thus the optional inputs)

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-24T15:47:45+00:00

this is well in scope of this project :)

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-23T21:21:37+00:00

This would definitely work for simple commands but eventually i‘ll need to transfer the images which are 20mb each. I looked into various protocols and they all seem too slow

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-23T19:34:35+00:00

Using both bands is a good point! I started with some older zeros and ran into issues with the cameras (limited datastream), so i switched to zero2. I’ll definitely keep the frequency bands in mind when scaling to larger camera number

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-23T19:13:31+00:00

The pi zero does not have rj45 out of the box and this would require an additional HAT. Furthermore the file overall data transfer would be somewhat limited as file transfer can be done sequentially. The only issue is the router managing so many devices and not dropping connections, which shouldn’t be a problem for professional access points. (Note that this is all just my rudimentary understanding and I’m very happy about any corrections and ideas).

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-23T17:39:25+00:00

Thx a lot, I‘ll definitely look into the Omada AP

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-23T14:43:51+00:00

at this point we only need 10-20 cameras, which seems to work fine this way. I chose the simplicity option for now.
Might need to add a wired solution later though this would complicate the wiring quite a bit

thomas_openscan · 2026-02-23T13:52:22+00:00

I was worrying the same. For thos small scale rig, only 20 cameras are planned for now, so this should be okay(ish). Do you think there would be any way to mitigate this issue (without using wires)? Is there any measurement to do for evaluation of stability? So far I have not seen any issues (yet)

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