Let me know what you think or post your questions here.
Great project. Any chance of a HDMI input with no CSI-HDMI adapter needed. Would be nice to be able to just plug in a DSLR or Mirrorless camera.
There have been questions about how open the hardware design will be. I understand that closed source binary blobs can be non-negotiable when dealing with graphics hardware but will the schematics etc be open source?
Thanks and good luck!
That´s a good idea and in theory it should be possible, but our main goal for now is to make it as compact as possible so that it fits into normal drone frames.
Shouldn´t be too hard to add that feature, but we´ll have to wait and see how things evolve.
The software will be OpenHD, so it will be as open as OHD. I don´t know if there are proprietary bits inside. You´ll have to ask the software developers for that.
Hardware will be at least partially open. Pinouts for cameras, board stacking connector,… will be available. Some cameras may also be open. That depends on the hardware we´re going to use, but for now the plan is to use off the shelf camera modules so there is no problem in making that open source. If a fully custom camera were to be made (PCB with sensor on it), it could be closed source due to legal decisions of the sensor manufacturer. That´s not our decision.
Exciting news, sounds like it will be great project. Can people get involved in the development, understanding main aspects will be proprietary/nda so I guess not the boards but maybe the heat sink, cables, camera enclosures etc
Thanks a lot for your feedback. I´m assuming that was a question?
The intention is for people to be able to create their own accessories for the system.
Pinouts of the board and cameras will be made available. We´ll also make the heatsink CAD data available so that users can design their own heatsinks (maybe so save weight or something like that) or to implement it into a housing design. A 3D modell of the finished board will also be provided in .stp format, so that it can be used for housing design or to get measurements.
Camera enclosures will also available in .stp format once they exist.
We´ll create a comprehensive documentation via Gitbook. Either in the existing OpenHD Gitbook or in a new one. That remains to be seen. But we will definitely provide lots of documentation to make the system as open, expandable and user friendly as possible.
(I deleted my first answer because it somehow wasn´t marked as a reply, IDK why.)
I think as the partner, a version with HDMI input at 1080 60fps minimum would seem to me something fundamental in the project. For me it is necessary for those of us who fly with airplanes, drones or ground vehicles. A version with HDMI and one without HDMI would be fine. I would only support HDMI version.
All the best.
Thanks a lot for your feedback.
We´ll have to see what´s possible and what´s not. For the beginning we´ll have to focuss on one solution. Existing setups with HDMI to MIPI CSI adapters should still work.
It is certainly possible to add such a feature to a second revision of the board or something like that, but we can´t make multiple versions in the beginning. It´s already hard enough to manage one version
We will consider your guys feedback and maybe make a version with an integrated HDMI input at some point but I can already tell you that the maximum input resolution would be 4K30.
For now the goal is to make it as compact as possible.
I had to delete the message again because it (again) didn´t get recognized as a reply.