oaCapture, Point Grey USB cameras and Raspberry Pi

[MCinAZ]

  One of the interesting aspects of living in the Desert Southwest portion of the US is summer time weather systems. We see all kinds of cloud formations, many of which evolve quite rapidly over the course of an afternoon. Over the past several years, I've occasionally used an old D-Link Ethernet security camera to capture an image every few seconds during, then created an animation from the set of frames. One particularly uninteresting example may be found at <http://tmckepsj.org/files/DCS-900W_20140917.ogv>. My current capture system leaves much to be desired: the camera suffers from poor resolution, poor sensitivity and it's noisy besides, the fixed lens is horrible, and I don't have the best window in the house to capture formations to the east, which is where the best action may be seen.

  I'd like to update my equipment complement this season, and I've been looking at getting an ICX445 (1288 x 964, color) Point Grey USB Blackfly camera. Ideally, I'd like to pair this with a Raspberry Pi, as that would allow me to install the system in my backyard observatory, where I can cut a window which provides a better vantage point. Since I only need to capture an image every 5 - 15 seconds, I don't think USB bandwidth should be an issue. I've seen some mention of Point Grey USB support in various discussions related to oaCapture, and that package would be my preference. Does anyone have any first hand experience with this combination (computer, camera and software) to provide insight as to how well I might expect it to work? If so, I'd be most interested to learn more. On an astronomical tangent, the Blackfly ought to be sufficiently sensitive and noise free to allow me to generate time lapse sequences involving the night sky, something I most certainly cannot do with the D-Link.

  -- Mike --
 

[riklaunim]

If you want to buy a USB3 Blackfly camera then use a PC that has USB3. Raspberry Pi has only USB2 with some power limitations and it bandwidth is shared with Ethernet. If you don't need fast framerate then there is PGR Chameleon - ICX445 on USB2 (but check prices, as in PGR store Blackfly is bit cheaper).

I used Chameleon on Linux, but only with their flycap software. I did test oaCapture, but I can't recall if with Chameleon or only with ASI. Capturing frame every X seconds may be tricky/impossible with normal capture applications. If you want something compact as a PC then you can look at some nettops with more recent Intel CPUs.