To liven up this community a bit, here’s personal industrial design project I did sometime ago: a concept of what a semi-pro camera system for smartphones could look like
To liven up this community a bit, here’s personal industrial design project I did sometime ago: a concept of what a semi-pro camera system for smartphones could look like
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That is a well-thought concept. I especially like the idea to attach the components to the lens and the camera itself to the smartphone magnetically, like a Mag-Safe charger to a laptop.
But here's the question:
Since the camera lens is not connected hardware-wise to the phone - how will the data (pictures) be transferred to the phone? I estimate the phone's display will be served as the viewfinder and the pictures will be stored in the phones flash drive. I could imagine that the camera lens will be connected via bluetooth, but wouldn't it result in a too low data transfer rate? When I transfer pictures from my phone to my laptop via bluetooth it takes several seconds per picture. An alternative Idea regarding the data transfer I could think of is to attach a cable from the lens to the charging port.
Yeah, Bluetooth alone wouldn’t work too well, with its 3 Mbit/s it’ll be either sending an HD feed at ~10fps or like 480p at 30 fps.
My best suggestion would be for the lens to create a wifi network as soon as it’s turned on that an iPhone can connect to. Some new wifi chips are pretty fast at that, takes a few seconds.
And depending on how overengineered you can imagine this thing to be, you can even use both — with Bluetooth LE maintaining connection and giving you access to the viewfinder as soon as possible (at lower fps), and then wifi kicking in several seconds later.