This is cool: The “Sitina 1” is the first ever Open Source E-mount Full Frame camera!

Engineer Wenting Zhang has designed a permissively-licensed FPGA-powered open source full-frame E-mount digital camera named the “Sitina 1“. Hackster reports:

The impressively compact camera is built around an AMD-Xilinx Zynq 7010 system-on-chip, which combines a pair of Arm Cortex-A9 CPU cores running at 667MHz with an FPGA featuring 28k logic cells. There’s 512MB of DDR3 RAM, an Analog Devices AD9990 signal processor and analog front-end connected to a Kodak/ON Semi KAI-11002CM color or KAI-11002M monochrome image sensor, with a 3.4″ 480×480 ISP panel at the rear for a user interface controlled via a grip to the right of the sensor.

The sensor delivers up to 10.7 megapixel full-frame images, with lower-resolution crop options available down to 5.6 megapixel APS-C square-format shots. Images are output as losslessly-compressed raw DNG files and JPEG images, while the display at the rear runs at 28 frames per second for the the live-view mode.

In other words Zhang has designed a perfectly decent camera, but with a twist: everything about the design is open, with the firmware and gateware released under the permissive MIT license and the hardware under the permissive version of the CERN Open Hardware License Version 2. Anyone suitably skilled can take those sources and build their own.

You can find the full repository and some image samples on Gitlab (Click here). And here are the detailed specs:

Hardware

• SoC: Xilinx Zynq 7010 (2x667MHz Cortex-A9, 28K logic cells FPGA)
• RAM: 512MB 16-bit DDR3 SDRAM
• AFE: Analog Devices AD9990
• Sensor: Kodak/ONsemi KAI-11000/KAI-11002M/CM
• Screen: 3.4″ 480×480 High-Brightness DPI IPS LCD
• External Ports:
  • SD slot (HS, 25MB/s)
  • USB Type-C (5V3A power supply)
  • Flash sync terminal

Camera Features

The following are possible with hardware, but not necessarily supported by the current software.

• Sensor Type: 35mm Interline CCD sensor
• Sensor Size: 36.0 x 24.0 mm
• Effective Pixels: 10.7MP
• Lens Mount: Active E mount
• Still Resolutions:
  • 4008×2672 10.7MP 3:2
  • 3563×2672 9.5MP 4:3 1.08X crop
  • 2672×2672 7.1MP 1:1 1.27X crop
  • 2782×1856 5.2MP 3:2 APS-C crop
  • 2676×2007 5.4MP 4:3 APS-C crop
  • 2365×2365 5.6MP 1:1 APS-C crop
• Still Format:
  • DNG (10/12/14-bit lossless compressed RAW)
  • JPEG
• Readout Speed:
  • 4008×2672 up to 5FPS
  • 4008×480 at 28FPS (line skipping live view, rescaled to 480×320 for output)
• Video recording is not supported
• ISO: 100 to 6400 (color version)

I would love to see more of those open source E-mount projects! But I wonder if Sony really keep permitting the use of their mount if this would become popular. Just recently Sony asked Freefly to no more use their E-mount :(