Connecting a camera to the mangOH Red

mangOH Red
1

I would like to connect a camera to stream the video input to my computer. The board has a mini-USB port but I would like to connect my Raspberry Pi camera which uses a CSI connector, do you think that would be possible?

2

Hey @antilop,

I may be wrong, but I believe the RPi camera is somewhat proprietary. We’ve been using the this camera from Adafruit over the MangOH’s serial UART , but it only supports still photos so this may not be suitable for your use case. We have some code for this available as well (if this interests you): https://github.com/brnkl/VC0706-cam-lib-legato

Cheers!

3

Thanks for your answer, I may be able to produce a motion jpeg stream but I don’t think a serial camera would be a good fit and streaming at >20fps don’t seem practical with this particular one.
Edit: The raspberry pi camera module seems to works better (lower consumption) when making use of the GPU of the RP2, this is maybe what you implied.

4

It definitely has it’s limitations that make it undesirable for certain use cases. It’s a great fit for low bandwidth with frequent transmissions. In terms of upgrading the camera, do you have any idea of the power spec you need to achieve? If you have enough power you could potentially use an IP camera and route it through the MangOH Red. I know @dclark75 did a demo here of something like this here: Setting up MangOH Red as Router to Cellular Gateway. You would likely need an ethernet switch and power over ethernet injector as well.

5

I don’t think it’s possible to use that camera easily. The WP modules do not support CSI. I did a quick search and it looks like Cypress makes a USB-to-CSI converter chip, but it requires USB3.

6

I forgot to mention that it will be powered by a battery and a solar panel, so as you said an IP camera would be too power-hungry. According to Adafruit, the VC0706 Serial Camera is not suitable for real-time video streaming. Thanks for the clarification @dfrey, I stopped seeking to use my RP camera. I don’t seem to have many choices though - that’s a lot of constraints for few options :confused:.