[nickparker]

Has anybody reverse engineered the interface for Apple's camera modules, particularly the front modules with LIDAR?

They can be had for $10 a pop on Alibaba now, and they're much nicer than similarly priced webcams let alone LIDARs.

Seems like a part that's ripe for a raspberry pi interface board.

[starky]

I would be very surprised if the camera modules put out anything different than the standard image sensor interfaces such as SPI, MIPI, and SLVS. Anything else would require extra circuitry that is too big. Then it just becomes a case of figuring out the control for the lens module.

[braincode]

I'm actually surprised that nobody tried to poke into those lines yet and built something similar to https://hackaday.com/2021/07/05/how-to-drive-smartphone-scre... but for the camera.

Actually, since that project above links to a iPhone 4 screen as an example, I'd perhaps err into probing for MIPI signals on an iPhone 6S camera first, perhaps using sth like https://hackaday.com/2018/11/29/mipi-csi-2-implementation-in...?

This post is fascinating, btw: https://www.circuitvalley.com/2020/01/spi-mipi-bridge-fpga-v...

[bydo]

The front iPhone camera uses an infrared array of dots for FaceID, not LIDAR. It's basically a miniaturized version of the Kinect from the Xbox (Apple bought the company that created it).

[tpmx]

The Face ID/TrueDepth sensor is however made by Austrian 'ams AG', not Apple.

[KMnO4]

I wonder what quality the “raw” camera has. My understanding is that the software has a bigger difference on the end result than the actual optics. So much so that Apple has a dedicated image processor as part of the Bionic chip.

Not to mention the “neural engine” that’s used for depth processing and segmentation.

[achow]

Image from any digital camera (SLR or Phone) is result of computation, unlike that from film camera where image is result of chemical reactions.

Optics (glass) does not play much role in phone camera cost or product development; but the cost (effort) is a factor of sensor, CPUs, NPUs, DSPs (hardware) and then investment in writing image processing software.

[cronix]

> software has a bigger difference on the end result than the actual optics

Not everyone wants artificially manipulated photos that you can instantly upload to instagram without any post work. But, you do need good optics and sensor to capture good photos - the rest is post manipulation. Do you think RED or ARRI cameras cost $50k+ for their built in software? Nope, they don't actually have any of the "neural net" hype you've bought into from Apple's marketing. It's all done in post. Practically nothing you see in the movies or TV or Netflix or other professional broadcast is done on Apple toy cameras using their state of the art "neural engine" software. I haven't read about or seen any, but I reserve the right to be wrong so I said "practically."

Besides, you got to start somewhere and the camera interface would come before the splashy software built on top of it.

Just give me the RAW/flat log files (that contain the most information and dynamic range) and I will do the rest with a real editing program that cost almost as much as your phone itself, and look way better.

[IfOnlyYouKnew]

Are they available for $10 or is that the price some "iPhone Teardown!!" article wrote?

Because I tend to be sceptical of those articles. They start with the premise of "everything is worth as much as the sum of its component parts", which is already hit on their credibility (if they did the same, recursively, they'd notice that nothing is worth anything). Then, they guess some random values for Apple's purchasing costs.

[rowanG077]

I'm not sure why you asking this. The poster quite obviously indicates you can trivially buy them on Aliexpress. You can verify this yourself in less time then it took to type this comment. And indeed the front-facing camera can be had for very cheap. The back module with Lidar is more expensive though.