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Prototype motherboard
It’s a big milestone for the Apertus° Open Source Camera project. The first images from the prototype Axiom Alpha camera
At the moment, as it is all at a rather experimental stage, the Axiom folks are working with a sample of the sensor that failed its Q & A tests which is more than adequate while working out the basics of getting images from the sensor. It’s an efficient way of getting things up and going without the outlay of a proper production unit and if something goes horribly wrong and the sensor gets damaged, it’s not as much of a tragedy.
Presently there is also problems of sensor dust and the current optical arrangement means the camera has to face the ceiling, and it also seems to produce some extreme ghosting- purely due to the prototype setup. However, at this stage it isn’t about getting the optical performance perfect but about getting images out of the sensor at all, which is quite a task in itself. The Apertus° team spent quite some time banging their head against a wall trying to just get half decent images from the sensor.
In order to get images from the sensor to the board the Apertus° team have had to wire up 70 tiny wires directly to the sensor. Each of these little wires are carrying data from the sensor at 300mhz and the data arrives from the sensor at different times meaning the output has to be tweaked to delay the data lines by different amounts so they are all in sync. It’s obviously not a minor task to get all this up and going but the Apertus° people have done it!
The first image was a DVD inlay from a movie shot by the Apertus° founder Oscar Spierenburg:
After analysing this first image, Apertus° then went to work trying to fix as many problems as possible (working hard to get rid of all the mountains of sensor dust for starters) and they produced this far more colourful rainbow image from electrical insulation tape:
Okay so not the most impressive images on the face of it (some nice colours though) but this is more like the situation when Edison first played back the recording of “Mary had a little lamb”, it’s more about reproducing the recording at all than getting really high fidelity results. It’s a big breakthrough for Apertus°. We hope it’s the first of many!
Tags: Technology
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