Cheap high resolution images that only need to be taken every minute

General
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Dear hardware hackers: I have a good challenge for you! What’s the cheapest way to get a really high quality, high resolution still image? (especially if we can get away from a raspberry pi!)

check out all our thinking here

https://www.reddit.com/r/embedded/s/iDzxDbvvS3

basically we need either

  1. a microcontroller with enough ram (~1gb) that is cheaper than a pi 5 2gb

  2. an array of 4 16mp cams that can sync perfectly that is somehow cheaper than our current setup of a 64mp arducam + pi5

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Hi Andrew,

You don’t need 1GB RAM on the MCU chip, you can have the extra RAM in a separate chip on the board instead. Audio moth does this, where the audio data is buffered by the off-chip RAM before it goes to the SD card. This extra RAM lives within the MCU’s address space, so it can be manipulated as though it lived on chip (but it might be slower).

The image resolution problem boils down to hi-res embedded cameras using a MIPI CSI interface to handle the extreme bandwidth, and so require a processor with that interface built in. Lower res cameras typically use a parallel interface which are suitable for more general purpose and lower cost MCUs.

Here is a technique that employs images captured by a handheld phone in a burst, to generate an image with superior resolution. The old mothbox screen that I recall was rather wobbly. That wobbliness could be helpful when using this technique. A related technique is Bayer drizzling, in which the image is shifted by a fraction of a pixel between consecutive captures, in order to increase resolution. Surveying the astrophotography state of the art may yield other suitable techniques.

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thanks for the cool suggestions harold! I am not sure we can use the burst technique because our bugs move a LOT (motion blur is a decently large problem for us as is!)