There’s nothing stopping you from plugging a USB camera into a Raspberry Pi mini-computer. But if you want a camera that’s tailor made for the $35 computer, the wait is almost over.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced earlier this year that work was underway on a camera board that connects to the unused CSI pins on the Raspberry Pi. Now their hardware partners at RS Components are showing off a prototype that’s very similar to the finished production module which should go on sale in early 2013.
The camera can shoot 5 megapixel photos or record 1080p video at 30 frames per second, using the H.264 codec.
In other words, you can use the camera module to turn a $35 Raspberry Pi into a security camera, video conferencing device, or just a little low power computer that can occasionally snap photos when the need arises.
The camera module should sell for $25 or less when it launches.
In other Pi-related news, the foundation has a new answer to one of the most frequently-asked-questions: Does it run Minecraft? That answer is… soon. A new version of Minecraft: Pocket Edition called Minecraft: Pi Edition is in the works.
via Slashdot
And why do we need that!? USB Camera is fine…
The bandwith you can push through the pi usb port is very limited and the processing to encode it into a compressed video would require all the power of the pi. 1080p video at 30fps cannot be achived without this board.