Hacker News Reader

Comment by Yaggo | Hacker News Reader

Too bad they didn't include camera module connector (CSI). Low-latency hardware-encoded h264 stream from camera is one of the most cool features in RPi platform. The Zero would be great e.g. for FPV fying folks, if it supported camera module. (USB cameras aren't answer here, as they typically don't have low-latency hw-encoding.)

View on HN

Yeah, I had hoped for that as well. But connectors cost money. Could the camera module be attached via the header?

> Could the camera module be attached via the header?

No. The Raspberry Pi GPIO header doesn't include all pins, and in particular it doesn't include pins that were used for other peripherals, such as the camera and display interfaces.

Interestingly you can get out DPI display signal from GPIO pins. Adafruit is using this technique with their Kippah display, giving you fully accelerated display signal (unlike those crappy low-fps-low-res framebuffer driven GPIO displays).

Correct. My understanding is that trick was made possible by design -- one of their engineers specifically chose pins to bring out to the GPIO header to facilitate it.

I've seen some variants on the "Kippah" to directly drive VGA.

I asked this on RPi forums and got clarification from their engineer. It's not possible to connect CSI camera to Zero via GPIO. Required CPU pads are not connected.

its not the connector, I have a suspicion Zero is 2 layer pcb

That's a shame. I was wondering if I could use a Pi0 with an old USB camera as a cheap IPCam.

You can. Just get a USB webcam. The GP just said you can't use the CSI webcam.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com