hello | juh
Description: Welcome - lain's spare time
Tangential to our collaborations at Nikon Hacker , astronomer and I have cause to interface directly with Sony image sensors. It happens that these tend to be available second-hand for relatively cheap—likely pulled from cameras sold for repair. For example, a while back I snapped up a D800 sensor module for just USD $80! An amazing deal for a 36 megapixel full frame image sensor, assuming it works as advertised, but I have not tested it yet…
Thanks to reverse-engineering efforts on the Nikon firmware, we were able to begin mapping the register space of the Sony IMX071 sensor used in the Nikon D5100. Last I checked, there’s still a lot we don’t know; though that’s a topic for another post. In any case we can replay the register values used by the D5100 to get the sensor up and running independently, so I’ll consider that “solved” for now.
The current challenge is interfacing the LVDS pairs, which carry the actual image data. LVDS stands for Low-Voltage Differential Signalling. For those not familiar, differential signaling schemes transmit the signal as the difference between two complimentary signals. I defer to Wikipedia for the advantages of differential signals .
hello | juh