Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2022 20:42:43 -0500
From: Luke Iannini
Subject: Exciting milestones in the Dynalite
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Two tantalizing scenes from miniature dynalamp-land…

Here’s a new molecular renderer (still atoms only for the moment, but it can handle quite a few! Richardson-style ribbons are underway[0]…) tearing through human growth hormone’s 1494 atoms at a silky smooth 60FPS on the wee little Pi!
Click to Download
pi-molecules.mov
9.8 MB

And we’ve now got full motion video capture from the Pi HQ cam piping through the renderer (watch the spinning top), via the Libcamera-based driver I’ve been working on.
(And as an awesome bonus this also gives us camera support on the Surface tablets for both front and rear-facing cameras, which are also only supported through the new LIbcamera API)

That’s all the hard bits done, now just to wire it up as a parallel option to our existing V4L2-based camera support...

Click to Download
pi-camera.mov
12.4 MB

The final milestone will be seeing how it fares on dot detection, but so long as it’s not too stately this is feeling like a pretty exciting new hardware primitive. The Pi4 + Case + Camera + Lens comes out at around $120, and the 1080p AAXA P7 I’m using here is only $380, making this a plausibly sub-$500 complete Realtalk setup. That feels like a big deal (************************). The P7 has a battery compartment and can run on them for about an hour and a half, so this can also be totally mobile. All I need now is a catchier name… I was calling it a Dynamite which is cute but maybe too explosive… Dynalite?? Dynalantern??

~Luke

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