Project Logs

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• Successful day

  Jacob David C Cunningham • 4 天前 • 0 comments

  I went out to a bird nature preserve type place, a lot of Geese

  It was pretty great setting the shutter speed to the reciprocal and getting the birds in flight.

  It was a bit dark at first in the settings. Today I'll work on getting Pelicam to a basic state but I will have to take a break and work on something else (for $).

  I really want to the build the next camera, it's simpler and will be yellow and grey in color.
  

  I had some pictures to add to this post but currently 500 error since last night oh well.

• Prepping

  Jacob David C Cunningham • 6 天前 • 0 comments

  I'm working on a lens hood right now.

  This is a cool zoom lens I bought it was $35, it's supposed to use 3 AAA batteries and have electronic auto focus but I just use it manually.

  With the 5.5x crop factor this lens is the equivalent of 1100mm zoom so yeah, it needs a tripod without the ibis. Going to do some bird photography this weekend.

  This was a very lazy tripod mount but it works.

  The STL files for above are here. I am working on this list of random lenses I try with the RPi HQ cam including photos/videos. This is my camera/sensor for maybe ever... I've had Sony Alpha cameras and what not but I like designing my own camera bodies/software and I think 12MP is enough if you know how to use it.

• Manual camera settings

  Jacob David C Cunningham • 02/23/2026 at 00:41 • 0 comments

  I did implement this on the basic-software branch (/pelicam/src/camera)

  I have to watch more videos/learn to see if it's actually working right

  For example in picamer2 ISO isn't a thing apparently, the equivalent is analogue gain

  See this YouTube short

• Scalar Crop

  Jacob David C Cunningham • 02/22/2026 at 02:37 • 0 comments

  Thanks to the people at Raspberry Pi Forums for chiming in. This way is better than what I was doing before in the past (literally taking small images quickly).

  So yeah I'm still using basic software

  I also added in basic "shake to wake" thing to use the IMU

  I did go out and do some photography. I initially went to this park but it was pretty boring/flat, middle of winter here so everything's brown/dead. This was the best pic I got. I'll have a video out tomorrow.

• Still basic

  Jacob David C Cunningham • 02/16/2026 at 03:56 • 0 comments

  Was a nice day, went out again

  The code it's using right now is the basic-software-3 branch which is pretty bare-bones and written quickly, hence it was freezing today

  Also got a new tiny camera so I can do POV videos

  I'm already designing a new camera since this one has a flaw where the sensor flange is not adjustable since it's glued to the body. Most of the lenses I use have to be unscrewed (flange distance increased) to focus.

  Also want a simple/easier to hold camera, it'll use the same display as this one the 2.8" Waveshare DSI display.

• First time out

  Jacob David C Cunningham • 02/08/2026 at 22:51 • 0 comments

  I knew the photos were probably not going to be great, also it's not a great time right now where all the flora is dead. But was still a great day, we were at 9F for a while then today it was low 60F.

  This lens is really cool the Canon TV Zoom 15-75mm. It's so much better in quality than the Rainbow H6mm.

  So yeah I gotta finish making the actual software and get back out there.

• Quick photography software

  Jacob David C Cunningham • 02/08/2026 at 05:53 • 0 comments

  Tomorrow's gonna be a great day weather wise

  Wanted to get out there, so I put together some minimal code which does:

  • live camera passthrough
  • button interfacing
  • taking and viewing photos
  • display on small OLED

  It's funny this top OLED doesn't really have a use yet but it looks cool.

  In this photo here I had the blue and red switched around (OpenCV thing) so I later did fix that

  The code is pretty bad but it'll work for tomorrow see the video and repo

  https://github.com/jdc-cunningham/pelicam/tree/basic-software (I will move this to the JDC34 camera repo)
  

• Tsk tsk

  Jacob David C Cunningham • 02/05/2026 at 04:22 • 0 comments

  Recursion still a problem lol, how hard can it be?! Traversing a nested object... anyway I'll fix that.

  Next update will be working with the hardware eg. consuming this JSON menu structure.

• Recursion

  Jacob David C Cunningham • 02/04/2026 at 02:25 • 0 comments

  So made some more progress, I was really trying to bust out this menu builder over the weekend but I got hung up on traversing the nested menu tree.

  With the tool above I have to reproduce this existing menu system (a little outdated).

  Then of course the icons have to be bounded to sub-menu scenes or hardware functions.

  Can see my stream of consciousness devlog here.

  I will point out, I'm trying to get the major functionality/features built out, doing it in broad strokes so it's not gonna be 100% perfect for now because I really want to get a working camera software and get out there with this camera.

• Drag n' drop

  Jacob David C Cunningham • 02/01/2026 at 01:35 • 0 comments

  Early update but I had to stop today when I got hung up on recursive traversing lol, I've done it before but was doing it near the end of day/burnt.

  This will be a desktop (electron) app.

  The "T" is a text box, still have to add that functionality in.

  So on the right there will be a nested menu similar to website menus that have nesting.

  And the end goal is they produced a nested JSON tree that defines a menu scene, with icon bindings (whether navigating to a sub-menu "clicking in" or running a hardware function)

  That's an old JSON structure but it'll work like that.

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