Dave Fischer Weblog

For the past year I've been experimenting with using a "Machine Vision Camera" for studio photography. MVC's are used for robotics, factory automation, terminators, etc. The one I have is an Imperx B6620M. It's basically a metal box with a 35mm sensor & f-mount adaptor on one side, and power & ethernet on the other side. If you want to get photos out of it, you have to write your own software. For starters I used it from a laptop, but then decided to build my own user interface box.

This one is mono: there's no color filter over the sensor. It's been really great doing real B&W photography for the first time since my high school darkroom days.

These are some photos I've taken with it (mostly with a Micro-Nikkor 105mm AIS lens):

And this is my homemade UI box, starting with the original foamcore mockup. (Did you know there are HDMI LCD screens on the market that don't work with X? Dammit. So I'm temporarily using an old droid as my viewfinder until I find a replacement LCD.)

The switches on the left are: shutter speed (coarse), shutter speed (fine), shutter delay, variable select, variable set. Switches on the right are shutter (full / thumb), focus assist, guidelines, resolution. Switches on the bottom row are: restart/quit, move photos to fileserver / thumb drive, status info, flash control.

Most of it's functioning already. Guidelines are just bitmap files I write in postscript - you can define a bunch, but the two I've been using are crosshairs & grid, for centering & aligning.

A screenshot of the viewfinder. Thumbnail, histogram, status info (currently including a lot of extra debugging info).