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danjulio / tCam

Thermal imaging cameras based on the ESP32 and Lepton 3.5
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Connect multiple tcam with hardwired connection? #10

Open leoshmu opened 4 months ago

leoshmu commented 4 months ago

Hi, Is there a way to connect more than one tcam to one raspberry pi? For example would you use a serial splitting hat for the Rpi, or is there a way to hardwire it directly without relying on an additional board?

danjulio commented 4 months ago

Hi. I'm assuming you mean tCam-Mini with the hardware interface. I think that a Pi could support two cameras attached this way. The limiting factor would be the SPI interface (https://pinout.xyz/pinout/spi). It has (I think) 4 serial interfaces so that shouldn't be a limiting factor.

Curious, any reason you can't just connect via Wifi?

leoshmu commented 4 months ago

I was going to try both hardwired and Wifi to see which is more performant. I would have guessed the hardwire approach would be better especially with 2 cameras but that may be a bad assumption. For the dual camera hardwire, with the 2nd camera be connected to the same TX/RX pins, but then the MISO/CLK etc pins would be different?

danjulio commented 4 months ago

You'd connect both the serial and SPI interfaces to different pins to prevent conflict on the lines driven by tCam-Mini. Plus the interface architecture really expects only one camera per interface.

Probably 2 cameras over wifi would be fine for streaming the full 9FPS. The upper limit is dependent on a lot of things such as signal strength and the AP performance but I've successfully streamed 6 cameras at full frame rate over my wifi here to various devices.

leoshmu commented 4 months ago

Sounds great, I will try with WIFI directly then.