Raspberry Pi 0 HQ USB Webcam

I am currently testing v1.30 of the new firmware. It allows you to tweak all factors related to the webcam if your image is too dark or too bright. It can even do some unimpressive emboss filters to your webcam... if you're crazy enough to do it.

Customizing camera settings

Override camera settings temporarily:

Log in to the debug interface. Then list all tweakable parameters:

/usr/bin/v4l2-ctl -L | less

Then you can directly apply parameters on the fly:

/usr/bin/v4l2-ctl -c auto_exposure_bias=15
/usr/bin/v4l2-ctl -c contrast=0

Override camera settings permanently:

Mount the SD card on your computer, and create a file called camera.txt in /boot and put all parameters you want overridden, e.g:

#Tweak the auto exposure bias
auto_exposure_bias=15
#Tweak the contrast
contrast=0

You can edit camera.txt on-target by remounting /boot read-write:

mount -o remount,rw /boot

Woohoo! It turns out that an incorrect USB speed setting caused the webcam to not work with macOS. Thanks to the excellent suggestion from Leonti, the issue is now fixed. As you can see, we are looking at the webcam on QuickTime. Excellent!

Now the webcam should work in all major operating systems.

With version 1.21, I also tweaked the auto-exposure so it doesn't over-exposure the object resulting in a more overally pleasant picture. 

Happy Zooming!

Get V1.21 at: https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam/releases

For debugging, a 115200 baud serial interface is provided as a ttyACM device:

• Please use screen or minicom to connect to it.
• Use username: root, password root.

Also, there is a untested serial interface on the serial 40-pin header: https://pinout.xyz/pinout/uart

If you want to modify the image content the quick-and-dirty way (not recommended):

• Start with the chroot-to-pi script: https://gist.github.com/htruong/7df502fb60268eeee5bca21ef3e436eb
• Edit /bin/bash to /bin/sh on the chroot /mnt/raspbian /bin/bash line.

Tweaking your camera settings

After you get into the pi by the debugging ttyACM interface, you'll see:

# cat /opt/uvc-webcam/start-webcam.sh
#!/bin/sh


/opt/uvc-webcam/multi-gadget.sh
/usr/bin/v4l2-ctl -c auto_exposure=0
/usr/bin/v4l2-ctl -c auto_exposure_bias=15
/usr/bin/v4l2-ctl -c contrast=0
/usr/bin/v4l2-ctl -c video_bitrate=25000000

/opt/uvc-webcam/uvc-gadget -f1 -s2 -r1  -u /dev/video1 -v /dev/video0

Now, you can change the v4l2 parameters on the fly and preview their effects on your camera output.

To get the list of tweakable parameters:

# /usr/bin/v4l2-ctl -L

This is how I tweaked the settings for V1.1. I think it's possible to squeeze even more performance out of this camera.

I just released V1.1 with some tweakings to image quality. This release should make your camera do a more agressive auto-exposure and thus improve the image quality in less-than-ideal lighting situations.

Sample image (1x1200 lumens light front, 1x1200 lumens light back):

V1.0

V1.1

Get it while it's still hot: https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam/releases

Got some rough comparison, excuse the model, that's me.

Dell XP 13 2019 Webcam

iPhone SE 2020 front camera

DSLR (Sony NEX 5R)

Show-me-webcam Pi 0 Cam + HQ Camera

For my untrained eyes, the quality of the Pi cam is way better than a laptop webcam but a little bit worse than a dedicated camera. It does bokeh very well and has a fixed focus so I would consider it a plus rather than a minus. The camera outputs a consistent 30fps on Windows and Linux, but it does not work on macOS for some reason.

I suppose it is possible to improve the firmware/software even more. For example, we can make it so the webcam auto-pans to the face. Or maybe we can warn the user when the webcam is out of focus. Or maybe we can even replace the background. However, those are the niceties that can be added later.