PS3 Eye Cameras Came in and RPi Machines are Going

Yesterday my five additional $6.00 PS3Eye 60 FPS cameras arrived. I’ve pulled my RPi machines and my two Ubuntu based NUC machines out and started checking out the cameras and making sure the systems are up-to-date.

RPi 3 machines and various supporting parts.

The NUCs generally get more use and thus needed less updating. I found that using cheese I was Immediately able to run the cameras on both the Ubuntu NUC machines and the RPi boxes. Even the older RPi-2 machines ran the cameras…I’m not sure that the performance on those will be sufficient to make them useful though. They do both have RPi internal cameras connected though so that may be of interest. I’ve got to look at how to access those cameras from C++ code and see what sort of performance they have (and test them out to see what they can do).

The RPi-2 machines with attached cameras…

Here are the cameras (the one sample I bought for testing and the five others that just came in). I may pick up a couple of spares to make sure that I have what I need in the longer run…at $6.00 each that isn’t a big deal). The beer pong balls look like the perfect size for a light diffuser on an LED…I’ll have to rig up a few LED/resistor/battery sets to try that out sometime soon.

Cameras and diffusers waiting to be unpacked.

On Sunday I’ll look at getting programmatic control of these cameras. If I can acquire images from two cameras at the same time and stream the data out over a socket, I’ll be ready to rock with these things.

Still to be managed is getting the cameras rigged to mount on light stands and getting three more light stands with ball heads to set them on. If the RPi-2 boards look interesting with their integral cameras then I may need some additional mounting options, but initially three to six cameras should be a good start.

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