new camera without autofocus and with wide angle lens, compared to old

[morrowwm]

https://imgur.com/gallery/uAZ3OAo compares my old camera with new.

The first image is from an Arducam 16MP Autofocus I had lying around when I first got interested in allsky. I have not been able to get it to stay focused at infinity. It has an 80° field of view. It's running on an RPi3, which works hard processing the images decimated by 2, so I've been creating 4x decimated images.

The second image is from the same Arducam 16MP IMX519 sensor but with a manual focus, 140° field of view M12 lens. It's on an RPi4, so I'm going to try images decimated by two. I have not been able to get binning working yet:

allsky/bin/capture_RPi: WARNING: Unable to take picture, return code=0xff00, WEXITSTATUS=0xff

Excited to see what tomorrow morning shows!

[troublestarter]

Good, give us your feedback :)

[aaronwmorris]

You might be able to setup 2x binning on the IMX519 with --mode 2328:1748:10

[morrowwm]

Thank you. I tried this. It's doing no harm. No idea if it's actually binning 4 pixels to one.

[EricClaeys]

The resolution will be 1/2 if it's binning.

[morrowwm]

https://youtu.be/srHUUzq0pLQ the new manual focus camera and wide angle lens

https://youtu.be/MxoycCZwPHo the old autofocus and narrow FOV lens

[EricClaeys]

@morrowwm, it's hard to compare with the different FOV in a video. Do you have a single exposure of the same view from both cameras?
Any idea why you weren't able to get the first camera to focus on infinity? You should be able to manually move to infinity then tell the camera to disable auto focus via the Extra Parameters WebUI setting.

[morrowwm]

it's hard to compare with the different FOV in a video.

I'll align them two, and see if I can get a good comparison tonight. Looks to be a clear evening.

[morrowwm]

https://imgur.com/gallery/MY8Kafs
comparison of the two.

I fiddle around with the --lens-position parameter of libcamera-still for the autofocus model. It has no effect. I'm thinking it is now a fixed-focus lens. :(

[EricClaeys]

If you run libcamera-still -v --shutter 1000 it should output something like "autofocus" if the camera supports autofocus.

[morrowwm]

Right, it does that. But the resulting images don't seem to change in sharpness of focus. I was being facetious above. I think the focusing mechanism is broken. libcamera-still accepts focus command options:

~ $ libcamera-still -v --shutter 1000 --autofocus-mode=manual --lens-position 0.1 --mode 2328:1748:10 -o test01.jpg 2>&1 | egrep 'autofocus|lens'
    autofocus-mode: manual
    autofocus-range: normal
    autofocus-speed: normal
    autofocus-window: all
    lens-position: 0.1
~ $ libcamera-still -v --shutter 1000 --autofocus-mode=manual --lens-position 1.0 --mode 2328:1748:10 -o test10.jpg 2>&1 | egrep 'autofocus|lens'
    autofocus-mode: manual
    autofocus-range: normal
    autofocus-speed: normal
    autofocus-window: all
    lens-position: 1.0

They just don't seem to do much. I'm retiring this old setup. The new one is working well.

[aaronwmorris]

Infinity focus is 0.0 (the default) per https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/camera_software.html

0.0 will move the lens to the "infinity" position

[morrowwm]

Nothing more needs to be said in this discussion, IMHO.