Does anyone know any good digital photography fora?
I'm trying to build kind of automatic time-lapse system. Image quality is not very important. I need:
1) Externally-powered camera: batteries will run out.
2) Ability to have a computer snap a picture, with fairly low delay, like <200ms. I can have a solenoid hit the shutter button if I have to.
(Manual focus and exposure is probably required for 2)
3)Ability for the computer to access the resulting images, without having to disable the camera to do so
4)Ability to focus down to a few inches
5)Has to work with Linux (beagleboard/raspberry pi/etc)
It doesn't sound so bad, but I've consider web-cams and the CHDK, and I haven't found a combination of hardware that will do what I need.
Webcams:
Have barely-adequate noise and resolution. Most of them will focus close enough, but I haven't found a way to capture images from them quick enough. I tried Mencoder, but there is too much delay. If I can snap fast enough, a webcam might work.
The CHDK:
Lets you do all kind of cool stuff like manually set focus and exposure. However, the only remote-triggering method supported by CHDK is via low-level hack of the USB port. Obviously I would probably need the USB port to access the camera images. I can trigger the camera with a solenoid on the shutter button, but it's still unclear if I will be able to access the image files on the SD card WHILE the camera is still being used. The best would be if I could directly send the files to the computer, or mount the SD card with NFS. I don't know of any cameras that play nice like this.
I looked into those Eye-Fi SD cards that have built-in WiFi, but they don't work nice in Linux; they have to be registered and connect to Eye-fi servers. People have created reverse-engineered eye-fi servers, but my system won't have an internet connection.
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