Raspberry Pi (camera) flex cable converter

Try googling  raspberry pi camera hdmi for other solutions

https://www.tindie.com/products/freto/pi-camera-hdmi-cable-extension/

I sell a Raspberry Pi Camera extension kit  . It converts the flatcable to standard IDC, and then back. If you need to swap often, you could then do that at the "IDC" side....

Hi Roger,

this might the concept I need ! The flatcable can be kept short for my purpose. I need to swap the camera module fast and very often.

Is it going to work for the new camera module V2 (8Mpix) as well?

Thank you .

Marc

Hmmm. Should work. But allow me to check! Not today, monday ok?

Hi,

Monday will be fine !  Thank you !

Please keep me informed.

Regards,

Marc

Hi,

this is very helpfull !! I will look at it.

thank you for your help.

Regards.

As expected the "cam_ext" kit also works for the 8Mpixel camera. I currently tested "80cm" as "working" and close to 3m as "not working". Apparently the limit in the distance is lower for the 8Mpixel version than for the 5Mpixel one.....

Not surprising when you consider more data at 8M pixels have to travel in a certain finite time. Thanks for the test rew

Roger,

I thought that the IDC flatcable must be shorter than in case of a 5Mp camera. The speed is higher for 8Mp.

Maybe a shielded cable can be longer? But maybe 80cm is more than enough.

Anyway, thank you very much for the test.

Regards.

Modern "fast" signals commonly travel over "differential pairs". USB at 12 Mbps started that, but SCSI at 20-40 MHz and higher probably already existed at that time. Nowadays this trick works up to signals in the Gbps range.

When a sata cable is say 60 cm long and you're doing 6 Gbps, the light speed dictates that around 12 bits are simply "in transit" ON THE CABLE! In reality it is about twice as many! (between 18 and 36 bits are in transit on the cable!)

This requires that the waveform of the signal coming out quite much resembles what went in at the other side. This is possible with differential pairs. That's why the important signals on the small flatcable but also on our extension kit are still next to each other: to make a differential pair.

But it also means that it doesn't really matter much how long the cable is.... The cable doesn't care if there is two, five, or ten

That remark of course isn't true: there are some losses and hopefully they are small enough so that the receiving end still can decode the signals. So.... It is the losses in the cable, that mean that the bits don't come through. Not the fact that the first bit has to have arrived before the next one can be sent.

Until further notice, we won't ship "cam ext" kits with a longer than 80 cm cable. This until I get the chance to test a few "in between" lengths.