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Separate camera and use ribbon cable

Pixy Hardware
#1

Hi.
Is it possible to move the camera off the board and use a ribbon cable i.e. like the RPi cam.
Sometimes the size constraints for where you need to put the camera can be tricky. One Idea I was working on was to use colored points on a person’s lips and tract mouth movements… and this was to happen inside the costume rather than outside.

Many thanks for any suggestions.
Dave

#2

Hi Dave,

unfortunately this is not possible with Pixy! The imager (actual optical sensor) under the lens is soldered to the board using BGA (ball-grid array) and is virtually impossible to rewire.

That said, we are working on a hardware revision that may solve your problem. No release date yet, but we’re hoping to have it out by end of this year.

Thanks,
Jesse

#3

Many thanks for the reply Jessie.

One of the things I am thinking of using the Pixy with is to map the user’s lips whilst they talk and so to convert that into animatronic and animated facial movements for characters. With the Pixy’s speed I can handle that realtime with an Arduino and keep it build in to a costume

Again thanks
Dave

#4

Any updates on this?? We are suffering from the same need to separate camera into a humanoid eye socket. We would be willing to buy in bulk and do post-production soldering ourselves, if need be.

#5

Hi Mike,

the next hardware revision is still in development, with no release date, but we’re shooting for inside a year I believe. What I meant when I said it might solve your problems was that we’re working to make the board / lens assembly physically smaller. The imager is still physically attached to the board.

Re: buying in bulk, it would be prohibitively expensive for us to do a run of boards without the imager attached. The best I could offer you would be to do distributor pricing for an order of 10+ stock Pixys. Send me an email at [email protected] if you’re interested and we can talk details.

That said, this is part of why we made Pixy fully open-source. All the PCB layout files are posted here: http://www.cmucam.org/projects/cmucam5/documents

So you’re welcome to modify the hardware for your own purposes, as needed.

Hope this helps!

Best,
Jesse

#6

Thanks! I’m running it past the guys to see if this is feasible…

#7

Hi.
I did not know that the schematics etc were up.

There are only about 20 connections to the actual camera so technically one should be able to make a daughter board for the camera, and modify the main design to have a cable.

Many thanks
Dave

p.s. - it is very low on my priority list however others should beable to experiment.