Question: Can I upgrade a DIY spectrometer with a Raspberry Pi camera?

The BIG advantage of the Raspberry Pi is the use of the Sony IMX298 sensor whose spectral bandwidth is known and is 16 megapixel sensor. Much like the bandwidth of the solux 35003 light source bandwidth. I am awaiting the arrival of a webcam which uses the Sony IMC179 sensor 8 megapixel camera. The current camera is capable of 8 megapixel resolution but only 640 are used.. The solution may be to upgrade SW to selectively switch camera resolution as needed. I look forward to your success with the rasp Pi. stef

That's a great thing to point out -- do you per chance have a link to the spectral bandwidth of the sensors? Thanks!

@warren

Here is a link http://www.khufkens.com/projects/ov5647-spectral-response/ and here is a zip file khufkens-pi-camera-response-curves-3342e29_-2-.zip Here are data sheets ProductBrief_IMX298_20160210.pdf and ProductBrief_IMX179_20140910.pdf

Unfortunately the curves end at 700nm. There is much more info in the first link. Regards stef

@warren

After sleeping it over, realized that due to the no IR filter of the raspberry the bandwidth response will be different from the published. BTW good luck finding one, seems everybody is out.

stef

I was wondering the same thing, just with the PiNoIR camera since I am more interested in remote sensing of vegetation.

I found that V4L2 driver apparently makes it possible to use the raspberry pi camera in Firefox with webrtc, the API Spectral Workbench uses: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=154437, which should be as easy as sudo apt-get install v4l-utils -- anyone able to try this?

Just wanted also to link to @stoft's input on this question in this comment:

As to the RPi camera, it seems to have two "difficulties" which need solutions: 1) a "convenient" solution for interfacing the camera, controlling parameters and extracting image data from it (i.e. USB or other? ... I've just not seen a clean option) and 2) the lens. The mount and lens are very small and I've discovered (as noted in the above note) that a better lens (~8mm) is really necessary. All the added pixel data is useless if the lens is junk. There has been some hacks to the RPi for other mounts, but the RPi board is very small so the hacks are not easy or a clean drop-in -- from what I've found so far. I also have not found specs on the chip sensitivity and dynamic range -- which is necessary for comparing cameras. If the sensitivity is low, then the background noise can also "seem better" -- but that is not a measure of image "quality" -- it is sensitivity and dynamic range that count. Also, it would be good to compare cost of RPi + uC vs USB module types. The added pixel resolution of the monochrome I used did not appear to provide "clearly better" results than the more moderate cost ELP. No, that is not definitive numbers, but it just indicates additional details worth observing so as to compare specs that are of importance to the resulting spectra. So, I'm not rejecting the RPi, it just does not yet appear to be a drop-in option.

raspberry pi camera: spectral response curves for more details go through my website you can get all details http://zipansion.com/1TSg4

Some serious progress has been made on this, for running SpectralWorkbench on the Raspberry Pi and connecting to it's camera: https://github.com/publiclab/spectral-workbench.js/issues/56