Do such items exist? Apparently it's a MIPI CSI cable, but I can't find anything other than the standard ribbon cable and the HDMI adapters.
Using the standard cable at 2 meters just isn't reliable.
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1Hardly surprising; the standard cable was designed for use in mobile phones over a distance of a few centimetres. I think everyone was rather surprised it worked at 1m, let alone anything longer. The HDMI adapters might offer a solution with shielded cables, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to find there's just not enough juice to drive the camera over that distance - it's not designed for it after all.– Dave JonesApr 27, 2017 at 8:47
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ugh. Is it shielding though or is it timing or both? The hdmi adapters would indicate that it's mainly shielding, right?– dethSwatchApr 28, 2017 at 15:28
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1 Answer
Per Dave Jones comment below your question, MIPI CSI-2 was never really designed with long range transmission in mind. It's widely used in mobile devices to connect their cameras to their mainboards ('MIPI CSI-2 is the most widely adopted imaging conduit in mobile devices'), which would put the 'normal' signal range at a few centimetres.
The best solution I've seen for extending range is the HDMI adapters (such as this one currently listed at pimoroni.com), which have supposedly been successfully tested using 'simple 5 meter HDMI cables'. The spiel posted against the Pimoroni adapters warns that 'The video signal should not show any degradation until a certain distance (yet to be found).Passed [sic] the limit the video signal will be lost entirely.' Basically, the longer your cable gets the worse the signal will become until all you're getting is noise.
If you need to put the camera further than 5 metres away I would recommend buying a second Pi, using a standard short camera cable, and streaming the footage from one Pi to the other over a network. You can achieve sub-100ms latencies at full resolution using something like gstreamer, which is close enough to real-time for most applications.
