Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Tag: Improvements
Making the world a better place, one piece at a time
The Big Box o’ Optics disgorged an ancient new-in-box Computar 4.8 mm lens, originally intended for a TV camera, with a C mount perfectly suited for the Raspberry Pi HQ camera:
RPi HQ Camera – Computar 4.8mm – front view
Because it’s a video lens, it includes an aperture driver expecting a video signal from the camera through a standard connector:
Computar 4.8 mm lens – camera plug
The datasheet tucked into the box (!) says it expects 8 to 16 V DC on the red wire (with black common) and video on white:
Computar Auto Iris TV Lens Manual
Fortunately, applying 5 V to red and leaving white unconnected opens the aperture all the way. Presumably, the circuitry thinks it’s looking at a really dark scene and isn’t fussy about the missing sync pulses.
Rather than attempt to find / harvest a matching camera connector, the cord now terminates in a JST plug, with the matching socket hot-melt glued to the Raspberry Pi case:
RPi HQ Camera – 4.8 mm Computar lens – JST power
The Pi has +5 V and ground on the rightmost end of its connector, so the Computar lens will be jammed fully open.
I gave it something to look at:
RPi HQ Camera – Computar 4.8mm – overview
With the orange back plate about 150 mm from the RPi, the 4.8 mm lens delivers this scene:
RPi HQ Camera – 4.8 mm Computar lens – 150mm near view
The focus is on the shutdown / startup button just to the right of the heatsink, so the depth of field is maybe 25 mm front-to-back.
For comparison, the official 16 mm lens stopped down to f/8 has a tighter view with good depth of field:
RPi HQ Camera – 16 mm lens – 150mm near view
It’d be nice to have a variable aperture, but it’s probably not worth the effort.
It’s been hiding back there since the first (attempted) use showed it wasn’t a quadruped:
Erick Magna Holder – as-delivered stance
Grabbing the other end in the bench vise and whacking the top of the offending leg with a brass persuader pretty much lined it up. Closer inspection showed a problem with the push-to-detach lever:
Erick Magna Holder – rivet pivot
The rivet head and thin washers extend a bit beyond the circular arc, with the rivet holding the leg above whatever it’s supposed to stick to. I think the scarring on the rivet was an attempt to improve the situation, perhaps during a QC adjustment session, that didn’t quite work.
The hole through the leg is a touch under 4 mm and the Big Box o’ Random Small Screws disgorged a 6-32 screw with what might have been a 5/32 inch = 4 mm nominal = 3.8 mm actual shoulder of exactly the right length:
Erick Magna Holder – 6-32 screw clearance
The screw head flange cleared the floor, but wasn’t much of an improvement over the rivet. I eventually chucked it in the lathe and removed the flange & hex-head corners, an improvement you won’t see here.
Even with the frame whacked into alignment, all four feet didn’t contact the surface plate along their entire lengths. Absent a surface grinder, I deployed a big blue Sharpie and the largest file on hand:
Erick Magna Holder – filing base
Iterating Sharpie and file eventually knocked off enough of the high spots to make it Good Enough™ for the intended purpose, which is definitely notprecision metrology:
Erick Magna Holder – bottom filed
Those chunky cross-pieces are Old School alnico magnets, which is the only reason a simple lever can pry it off a steel plate.
Contemporary vacuum cleaner dust brush heads have bristles in some combination of [long | short] with [flexy | stiff]. The long + flexy combination results in the bristles jamming the inlet and the short + stiff combo seems unsuited for complex surfaces. Shaking the Amazonian dice brought a different combination:
Vacuum cleaner dust brush assortment – with adapters
That’s the new one on the bottom and, contrary to what you might think from the picture, it is not identical to the one just above it.
In particular, the black plastic housing came from a different mold (the seam lines are now top-and-bottom) and required a new adapter for the Kenmore Progressive vacuum cleaner’s complicated wand / hose inlet, with a 3/4 inch PVC pipe reinforcement inside.
Early reports indicate it works fine, so I’ll declare a temporary victory in the war on entropy.
As far as I can tell, Raspberry Pi cases are a solved problem, so 3D printing an intricate widget to stick a Pi on the back of an HQ camera seems unnecessary unless you really, really like solid modeling, which, admittedly, can be a thing. All you really need is a simple adapter between the camera PCB and the case of your choice:
The plate has recesses to put the screw heads below the surface. I used nylon screws, but it doesn’t really matter.
The case has all the right openings, slots in the bottom for a pair of screws, and costs six bucks. A pair of M3 brass inserts epoxied into the plate capture the screws:
RPi HQ Camera – case adapter plate – screws
Thick washers punched from an old credit card go under the screws to compensate for the case’s silicone bump feet. I suppose Doing the Right Thing would involve 3D printed spacers matching the cross-shaped case cutouts.
Not everyone agrees with my choice of retina-burn orange PETG:
RPi HQ Camera – 16 mm lens – case adapter plate
Yes, that’s a C-mount TV lens lurking in the background, about which more later.
This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
As part of spiffing my video presence for SquidWrench Zoom meetings, I put a knockoff RPi V1 camera into an Az-El mount, stuck it to a Raspberry Pi, installed the latest OS Formerly Known as Raspbian, did a little setup, and perched it on the I-beam over the workbench:
Raspberry Pi – workbench camera setup
The toothbrush head has a convenient pair of neodymium magnets affixing the RPi’s power cable to the beam, thereby preventing the whole lashup from falling off. The Pi, being an old Model B V 1.1, lacks onboard WiFi and requires a USB WiFi dongle. The white button at the lower right of the heatsink properly shuts the OS down and starts it up again.
Zoom can show video only from video devices / cameras attached to the laptop, so the trick is to make video from the RPi look like it’s coming from a local laptop device.
Start by exporting video from the Raspberry Pi:
raspivid --nopreview -t 0 -rot 180 -awb sun --sharpness -50 --flicker 60hz -w 1920 -h 1080 -ae 48 -a 1032 -a 'RPi Cam1 %Y-%m-%d %X' -b 1000000 -l -o tcp://0.0.0.0:5000
The -rot 180 -awb sun --sharpness -50 --flicker 60hz parameters make the picture look better. The bottom of the video image There is no way to predict which side of the video will be on the same side as the cable, if that’s any help figuring out which end is up, and the 6500 K LED tubes apparently fill the shop with “sun”.
The -l parameter causes raspivid to wait until it gets an incoming tcp connection on port 5000 from any other IP address, whereupon it begins capturing video and sending it out.
That’s the edge of the workbench over there on the left, looking distinctly like a cliff.
The RPi will happily stream video all day long to ffmpeg while you start / stop the display program pulling the bits from the video device. However, killing ffmpeg also kills raspivid, requiring a manual restart of both programs. This isn’t a dealbreaker for my simple needs, but it makes unattended streaming from, say, a yard camera somewhat tricky.
There appear to be an infinite number of variations on this theme, not all of which work, and some of which rest upon an unsteady ziggurat of sketchy / unmaintained software.
Addendum: If you have a couple of RPi cameras, it’s handy to run the matching ssh and ffmpeg sessions in screen / tmux / whatever terminal multiplexer you prefer. I find it easier to flip through those sessions with Ctrl-A N, rather than manage half a dozen tabs in a single terminal window. Your mileage may differ.
The general idea is to hold the wave washer (it’s mashed under the flat washer, honest) above those bumps on the plate holding the mirror and stalk balls. It’s a few millimeters from the end of a ¼ inch brass rod, drilled for the M3 screw, and reduced to 4.5 mm with a parting tool to clear the bumps.
While I was at it, I made two spare mirrors, just to have ’em around:
I should replace the steel clamp plates with a stainless-steel doodad of some sort to eliminate the unsightly rust, but that’s definitely in the nature of fine tuning.
Applesauce is completely optional. Should you prefer a softer & sweeter loaf, give it a try.
Conversely, reduce the sugar by about half if you’ve accustomed yourself to a keto-oid diet; the raisins carry enough sweetness for us. You can use brown sugar if you like.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 