both fish and fowl?
Sep. 4th, 2013 09:23 pmsony has introduced a rather curious camera:

it's meant to be used with smartphones, but it can be used as a stand-alone camera (with difficulty, since it lacks a display or view-finder). however, if sony has the sense to provide an API for it, i think it could be a great boon to robotics hobbyists and other hacker types.
it's far more powerful than a typical board-level camera, and it's designed for wireless control already, potentially making interfacing with high-level code much easier. it really needs a hacked-up micro-SD card (or some such) so that high-resolution images can be grabbed in real time. it's not clear what sort of video it sends to the camera for view-finding, in terms of resolution, frame rate, or format, so i'm not sure how useful that is. still, with a suitable API and a standard format, even that should be usable for some applications.
my impression is that sony isn't very good about open... well, anything, but i can hope, right? does anybody know if they've released APIs for any of their various products? or alternatively, who to pester there about opening the client software up?

it's meant to be used with smartphones, but it can be used as a stand-alone camera (with difficulty, since it lacks a display or view-finder). however, if sony has the sense to provide an API for it, i think it could be a great boon to robotics hobbyists and other hacker types.
it's far more powerful than a typical board-level camera, and it's designed for wireless control already, potentially making interfacing with high-level code much easier. it really needs a hacked-up micro-SD card (or some such) so that high-resolution images can be grabbed in real time. it's not clear what sort of video it sends to the camera for view-finding, in terms of resolution, frame rate, or format, so i'm not sure how useful that is. still, with a suitable API and a standard format, even that should be usable for some applications.
my impression is that sony isn't very good about open... well, anything, but i can hope, right? does anybody know if they've released APIs for any of their various products? or alternatively, who to pester there about opening the client software up?