PINE64 Unveils the PineCam, a More Powerful RISC-V-and-Arm Successor to the PineCube Camera

Open hardware specialist PINE64 has announced a surprise new device: the PineCam, a network camera device that serves as the successor to the company's earlier PineCube.

"While the PineCube didn’t achieve the success the project had hoped for, we believe it wasn’t due to a lack of interest in such hardware, but rather the way it was executed," explains PINE64's Lukasz Erecinski of the PineCam's predecessor. "We've gathered feedback, learned from what went wrong, and have gone back to the drawing board. This time, the PineStore have decided to take a different approach, using a system-on-chip (SoC) already in our hardware line-up. The device includes more RAM (compared to the PineCube’s 128MB), and utilizes a camera interface that 'just works.'"

The new PineCam's hardware is based on the company's Oz64 single-board computer (SBC), using the same Sophgo SG2000 system-on-chip — giving it two T-Head XuanTie C906 RISC-V cores, one running at 1GHz and one at 700MHz, plus an Arm Cortex-A53 core running at 1GHz, a tensor processor for on-device machine learning with a claimed 0.5 tera-operations per second (TOPS) performance at INT8 precision, and a microcontroller core based on the venerable Intel 8051 architecture.

To this, PINE64 has added 512MB of RAM — enough, the company says, to run a full Linux-based operating system, such as MotionEyeOS, directly on-device — and a GalaxyCore GC02M2 two megapixel camera. This, unusually, connects to the host through a MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) to USB carrier board — meaning it can be disconnected from the PineCam mainboard and used as a generic USB webcam. There's infrared LEDs for night-vision use, an integrated microphone and speaker, and user-accessible general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins that match the Oz64's pinout.

"The PineCam is currently in early prototyping stages, with the plastic body and final PCB having just arrived in recent weeks," Erecinski writes. "However, the hardware is taking shape quickly and the printed circuit board assembly stage is currently on track for around the end of October. The first batch will be making its way to developers soon. The PineStore hasn’t zeroed-in on a price point just yet, but the device will cost less than $30 upon release."

More information is available in the PINE64 November 2024 community update, along with news of its involvement with YuzujiHD in the Avaota-A1 single-board computer project unveiled back in April.