
Edgertronic - The first affordable high speed video camera - cocoflunchy
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1521768569/edgertronictm-the-first-affordable-high-speed-vide
======
edgertronic
The edgertronic camera was designed to fill a huge hole in the high speed
video camera market.

Currently, at one end of the market are consumer cameras where high speed is
basically an afterthought (there's only so much you can do with a rolling
shutter). At the other end are the ultra high end cameras used for big buck
productions that cost $250K and up.

The edgertronic has a global shutter and all the other specialized design
features that make it a straight up high speed video camera.

We could have come out with a camera that's faster/higher resolution but it
would cost more. Just like with cars: "Speed costs money. How fast do you want
to go?" This camera strikes a nice balance between price and performance.

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1521768569/edgertronict...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1521768569/edgertronictm-
the-first-affordable-high-speed-vide)

Mike

~~~
reportingsjr
Can you guys tell us more hardware specs like the processor/fpga (I would
assume fpga?), sensor (pixel count, pixel pitch), ram size and speed, etc?

Wondering if it would be possible to cool the sensor to lower the noise floor
and thus require less light. Will you guys also allow programming of the fpga
for image processing and other uses?

Appreciate it!

Edit: Also, why 100Mbps Ethernet?? Almost all networks are GigE and with the
frame rate you guys are talking about it could use the faster speed!

~~~
sbierwagen

      Also, why 100Mbps Ethernet??
    

1.) It records to SD card. Ethernet is just used for live preview, not
production footage.

2.) The bottleneck is the internal buffer. (and H.264 encoding) Gigabit
ethernet wouldn't be fast enough to stream uncompressed high-speed video.
Upgrading to either 10 gigabit ethernet (expensive!) or realtime 1000FPS H.264
encoding (really expensive!) would break the $5,000 budget.

    
    
      cool the sensor to lower the noise floor and thus 
      require less light
    

Difficult...

A high speed camera obviously has to have very short exposure times in order
to work at all. (Can't get faster than 2FPS with a 1/2s exposure time)

The general rule of thumb is that you can trade off one "stop" in either
direction-- 1/100, f/4, ISO200 is the same as 1/50 f/5.6 ISO200 is the same as
1/100, f/5.6, ISO400.

My guess is that even with heroic cooling (liquid nitrogen) you'd only get
from the usual wildly excessive lighting needed for high-speed cameras, down
to merely "really bright." You'd never get to a point where you can light a
scene with just indoor lighting.

~~~
edgertronic
sbierwagon,

Thanks for the excellent response to reportingjr. You beat me to it.

I spent a lot of time making the edgertronic a balanced design. All the parts
work well together. On the computers we've tested with, the speed of the web
browser and cpu/graphics processor is the bottleneck, not the ethernet.

I did look at GigE but it would have increased cost, size, and power without
adding any real benefit.

With this type of sensor, cooling won't measurably improve noise.

We'll design other cameras in the future, but we had to start somewhere, and
this is it.

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adam-a
Curious if this will find support with the media industry. The first thing
that jumps out is that it doesn't use the standard TV and film resolutions
1080/720/480\. From talking to film makers I know about digital photography I
think they would find that list of resolutions quite alienating and possibly
assume it wasn't suitable for their needs.

The quality of the images and the price look very good however.

[edit] I see it does have 720 and 480, but not the important 1080, which would
make it "HD". Having had a brief look at some of the competitors though, most
of them seem to operate on weird resolutions like 1024x1024[0], so I guess it
must be expected from a slo-mo camera.

[0]
[http://www.photron.com/?cmd=comparison](http://www.photron.com/?cmd=comparison)

~~~
samwillis
It does do 1280×720 which is 720p, most people would call that HD.

True its not 1080P but at 700 frames/s at 720p you are going to get incredible
pictures.

~~~
tankbot
Minor note, but the p (or i) is not important here, so it would just be HD720
or HD1080. The p/i denotes a method of displaying the image, either through
interlacing[0] or progressive scan[1].

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlaced_video](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlaced_video)
[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_scan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_scan)

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tlb
Backed. I've used a few different high speed video cameras for walking robot
research, and this seems like exactly what I want.

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zeckalpha
Awesome. There's been a lot of neat optics work in the last few years driving
costs down. I can't wait for every camera to be able to do this and this:
[https://www.lytro.com/](https://www.lytro.com/)

~~~
sixdimensional
I also have hopes for [http://www.muoptics.com/](http://www.muoptics.com/)
too!

~~~
bri3d
With respect to Mu, check out this EEVBlog thread:
[http://www.eevblog.com/forum/crowd-funded-
projects/m-thermal...](http://www.eevblog.com/forum/crowd-funded-
projects/m-thermal-imager-real-or-fake/) .

As a disclosure I backed just for the fun of it and haven't asked for a refund
yet but with each new "update" their "CEO" releases I grow increasingly
skeptical that Mu Optics are ever releasing a real product. Not only did their
pricing seem too good to be true to begin with but their updates are
needlessly vague even with IP concerns in mind.

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whyenot
I really hope they get funded, but for a hobbyist the camera is still pretty
expensive. I suspect there are many "weekend" GoPro users who would love to
have a supplemental camera that shoots at 240 or 480 fps instead of of the
GoPro Hero3's max of 120 (ideally also getting rid of the rolling shutter).
But, I think a camera like that would only really sell if you can get the
price down to below $500. That way you can use the camera in interesting,
somewhat risky locations, but while it still hurts, it's not the end of the
world if you lose it or break it.

~~~
asynchronous13
the max framerate for the go pro is 240fps at WVGA resolution.

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whyenot
Yes, I forgot about that, but it has a max of 120fps in HD quality (720p) /
Protune video.

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yetanotherphd
Can someone explain to me some things that I'm too lazy to Wikipedia?

How long can this camera shoot continuously for? And what frame rate can it
transfer image over its I/o ports?

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mmanfrin
Nearly $5k is 'affordable'?

~~~
wmf
Maybe they're trying to be modest by not mentioning the prices of their
competitors which are $100K or more AFAIK.

~~~
edgertronic
In many parts of the country, a nice house costs less than the high speed
camera used in the last World Series.

