Raspberry Pi Wide Angle Zoom Lens

Pimoroni now stock a new lens for the Raspberry Pi HD camera. This one is a zoom wide angle lens. I’ve been impressed with the quality of the longer focus lens that I got a while back, so I thought I’d invest in the new one too. The price is very reasonable at 15 pounds.

The quality is very good. Focussing is fun. It is not a “pure zoom” in that if you change the zoom settings to move closer or further away from the subject you will have to refocus. And sometimes (at least on mine) I can’t find focus positions for some zoom settings. But the bokeh (the effect you get when things are out of focus) is rather nice in a blurry kind of a way

The artistic view..

I’m using mine to give an overhead view of my work area for videos. If you want to do this you’ll need to set the camera up so that it gives you a full desktop view. This is the command that I use:

raspistill -t 0 -p 0,0,1920,1080

This makes the viewfinder image from the camera fill my video output, you can change width and height values to match the display values you are using.

The lens will focus very close, which makes it ideal for viewing components and circuits. If you have the Raspberry Pi HD camera unit it is well worth a look.