Arducam Autofocus Camera for Raspberry Pi Quick Look

what's up guys today i'm taking a look at this new camera module for the raspberry pi arducam sent this over for me to preview and this new module isn't out yet there's a kickstarter for this beginning november 30th and you'll be able to pick this camera up for your raspberry pi for 25 bucks the big selling point of this new camera module in comparison to the old models is that this one does have auto focus where the previous models did not quick disclaimer arducam did send me this module for free for review purposes but that will in no way influence my opinion of the product however today's video is not really a full review this is just a quick look i'm going to pull the camera out of the box set it up and do some day one playing around so if there's anything i miss or anything you would like me to check out in a full review be sure to post your suggestions in the comments below but with all that being said let's move on with setup the physical side of things is pretty simple you've just got to be a bit meticulous with this ribbon cable just plug the ribbon cable into the camera port and make sure that the blue side of the cable is facing the side of the raspberry pi with the usb ports admittedly my final rig looks a little jank but it should get the job done for what i'm doing today and for the software side of setup nothing fancy i like to work smart not hard so i'm just following the steps on arducam's website and copying and pasting all of the commands into the terminal to get libcam installed i'll put a link to these instructions in the description but there's really nothing to it just read the step do the step and get the banana okay and now for the moment of truth if we run this command right here this should give us a preview image so here we go okay and it looks pretty good to me now the audio may be off because i'm recording this through a capture card the output of the pi through a capture card and my audio into the computer with the capture card so the audio sync could be a little bit off so overall i think this camera looks pretty good i have a single ring light on right now so i would say that as far as lighting goes this camera handles it pretty well let me turn on some extra lighting here okay yeah this is just a quick and dirty here i've not really messed with any kind of exposure settings in the camera but i think overall this looks better than most webcams that i've seen like i said i haven't messed with any of the exposure in the camera so these spots are a little bit hot but i'm not going to worry about that now all right so i've messed around with this a bit and it's not a true continuous autofocus it basically grabs focus when you first open the camera with that auto focus command so if i try and go out of focus it doesn't happen all right so it is considerably later in the evening and i had overlooked something in the documentation and i want to go over that now so i forgot to add a dash dash key press after the dash dash auto focus command so we're going to add that in now i'm going to go over that and show you how we can refocus on the fly and as you can see here i've got the key press command entered into the command line so we're gonna try that out now okay so we've got the the camera has focused on me and let me move this window out of the way because everything is done through this window right here so if we hit f and then enter it's going to refocus it just refocused on me so i was the subject there let's test this out with spiderman here and that's pretty fast auto focus i wish there were some way to actually auto focus as the subject moves but uh really that's not bad that's pretty impressive especially for a 25 dollar camera all right yeah like i said i this is later in the evening so if this video seems a little bit out of order now that's why i'm going back to what i had recorded earlier now so back into the flow of things but there is a set of commands that you can run here to take control of the focus and if we go into [Music] if we go into this directory here and then run this python command now we've got this control applet here where it says focus up down arrow and reset r so we can go up down and then r will give us a reset so so yeah this is pretty cool and as far as like a webcam goes we're getting some pretty nice bokeh back here as webcams go let's see what kind of separation we can get i've got this remote about six to eight inches away from the camera right now so yeah overall i think it looks pretty good i'm not sure what resolution this is by default what i'm going to do is close out of these things and i'll close out of this one and now i'm going to try to open the camera preview up in 1920 by 1080. and that appears to be working now that i still have this open yeah i'm really kind of blown away by the auto focus quality of this small camera so overall i'm thinking this looks pretty good one thing that i will say that i do like about this camera right away is that we're not getting crazy uh auto exposure and auto white balance out of the box if i move my hand around we're not seeing we're seeing a little bit of lighting compensation happening in the background here but it's not to a crazy degree like you see with some webcams like look at the gray in my wall here as i move around you'll see there's some lighting changes but it's not like a an absurd ridiculous amount and i can set the white balance and i can set the exposure level to take care of that so that's something that i'm not too worried about right now it's something that i will fiddle around with later that's about all i'm going to look at with this thing today i think overall this thing is really awesome it's going to be 25 bucks and there's a kickstarter that's starting on november 30th for this and i'll put a link in the description for that kickstarter the other thing that i'm going to do with this is i'm going to do a follow-up video where i want to try to adapt this camera to my raspberry pi webcam here that i made so that's going to be the next project coming up but yeah i don't have time to get to that today overall i'm really impressed with this camera but i'm going to wrap this video up here thank you so much for watching that's it for now and i'll see you next time you

Channel: Low Dough Tech

Views: 11,876

Keywords: webcam, camera, streaming, obs, tech, budget, cheap, money saving, gopro, capture card, diy, tutorial, how to, video, youtube, canon eos webcam utility, cheap webcam, budget webcam, sj4000, cheap action cam, action camera, budget action cam, how to live stream, game, video game, elgato, stream, twitch, how to stream, make money, money making, photograpy, gear, equipment, computer, pc, low dough tech, deal, great deal, gift, good gift, great gift, windows, linux, mac, apple, android

Id: vbtPrxy-4mw

Length: 8min 50sec (530 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 28 2021