tesla500 is a Youtube and Patreon video channel by Electronics Engineer David Kronstein that has a lot of videos of engineering projects and troubleshooting / fixing stuff. Some videos are based on a homebrew camera project that gained our attention. The camera is a high speed monochrome at the moment with HSC768 name which is based on the data rate of the image sensor, in this case 768Mpix/s, or about 960MB/s . The camera project started in 2014 as a way to get a high speed camera for the lab without paying the hefty premium.

HSC768 main specs:

• Current Camera Specs No Final Name Set:
  • LUX1310 image sensor
  • 1280×1024 at 1070fps
  • 4000fps+ at 640×480
  • H.264 Compression
  • 16GB of DDR3 RAM, 8 sec rec time at full speed, working on 32GB a future possibility
  • HDMI, USB, ESATA
  • Touchscreen and Portability

More detailed info of the project with schematics can be found here!

Camera testing first recording:

Fast forward a few months and the camera now had a Jog Wheel, a full simple but effective UI with full touch controls, live view and easy start stop recording.  See the video below:

Camera running and tear down of the design:

Some of the case build machining for the prototype:

Samples of the camera recording experiments:

As you can see the quality of the recordings and ease of use of the camera are spectacular for a prototype. We have contacted David Kronstein about the possibility of offering the camera for sale at some point but have yet to hear back. We certainly hope that the project can have some legs further on and the camera can have a Kickstarter or similar campaign to get into mass production. The software is brilliant and the design seems solid at first glance.

Last sample released Jan 2016- Lawnmower Drop-n-Shred things:

While the camera resolution and performance are pretty close to what the edgertronic already does, it does strike us as a marriage between the design of the software and portability could merge with that camera and create an SLR style touchscreen capable high speed camera for about 5k US very close to what the TS3 Cine by Fastec imaging can do.   The fps1000 is entering that market with their models based on Flash memory arrays but there is no competition at that price point based on DDR RAM modules.

If anything it is an impressive project that could in theory deliver a worthwhile contribution to the low cost high speed HD capture market.  Congratulations on the project David!

We will update the info on this project as it becomes available.

You can support David’s channel and projects by funding it here:

https://www.patreon.com/tesla500?ty=h