Hello All, I plan to develop a small handheld digital video recorder, and it looks like the Raspberry Pi might be just the piece of base-kit I've been looking for!
For the basic device, I need to connect an LCD touchscreen to it, which I would guess I can do via one of the USB ports, and a composite video (CVBS) input. For future use, I'll need ADC and CAN-comms inputs, but that all looks fairly straight-forward, based on what I can see from the specs docs.
I was looking at the Beagleboard for this initially, but I hope to make small batch production runs with it for a business start-up. The Beableboard people repeatedly say that it's not suitable for production runs, but don't say why unfortunately, so that's why I'm now pinning my hopes on the Raspberry Pi.
Can anyone out there help me out with these questions:...?
- From reading through the spec and some of the posts here, it looks like there is plenty of power to decompress a digital-video file and drive out a video stream to the HDMI or Video port, but what about the other way around - compressing a video input stream? Is the MIPS of the ARM core and the available memory on the Raspberry Pi board enough to compress a video input stream (probably H.264), in readiness for storage to some kind of mass media (SD-Card, or possibly a USB SDD)?
- I see that there is something called a 'Camera Port' on-board, but can't find out much about it - is this suitable for composite video input, or is it for something else entirely?
- In case I can't connect a CVBS signal straight into the board, for a backup I've also been looking for a piece of hardware that I could use for digitising a CVBS input into a USB port, but the only one I've found that's even close to what I need costs a small fortune, and knocks my target price for six! I want to get hold of somethig like those cheap bits of video=>PC conversion gadgets that are in abundance on eBay (etc), but that also allows integration into other systems. Does anyone in the community know of such a thing for around £20?
- I want to use a touchscreen input to side-step the logistical complexity of having user-buttons read into the GPIO ports - is USB the only way I'm likely to be able to get a touchscreen input into the Raspberry Pi, or does anyone know of a device that would enable me to hook a touchscreen up to an interface that's already on the board?
- Lastly, is the Raspberry Pi suitable for what I want to do, or would I still be better off looking at the Beagleboard, or even Beaglebone?
The Raspberry Pi looks like a fantastic peice of equipment for this kind of thing - and it's British - and I'd love to be able to use it for my project, so any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Doug Ponsford.
