Elphel Eyesis camera optics and lens focus adjustment
Designing for low parallax
texture_tiles
When we started working on Eyesis project our first goal was to make the panoramic head as compact as possible to reduce parallax between sensors. That not only reduces the stitching artifacts but also decreases the minimal distance to object without dead zones between the individual camera.
The first practical step was to reduce the PCB area around the sensors, especially in one direction, so multiple camera boards can be placed closer to each other, For that purpose we preserved the basic design of the proven 10338 sensor board, just changed the layout to make it more compact. The board 10338D is just 15mm wide – more than twice less than the older design.
Next step was to run mechanical CAD program and try to place the boards and lenses. Most of the Elphel cameras were designed for the C/CS-mount lenses, but when I tried to place them I immediately found out that when using 10 or 8 cameras around even the C-mount thread (CS is the same size but even closer) will be the limiting factor, not the sensor PCB that we already made smaller.
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