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Here's my white whale: currently, the cheapest way to get a really high resolution. Nice quality image from a system that you can program easily and run on a schedule a very low power is Arducam 64mp owlsight + rpi 5 If we can find a way to use that camera with cheaper board it would be huge!

I'm assuming most of the unwanted cost comes from the pi 5.. if you're willing to spend a bit more on the sensor assembly itself, you can get one with a built in 480Mbps USB2 interface (i'm seeing around $100 for a 48MP sensor)

Then you don't have to write a mipi driver and all your microcontroller needs is a USB2.0 host driver, you can just pull a jpeg (i assume?) from the camera module, even if you have only enough psram to store a jpeg, you just dump it to sd card, done.

Ok it looks like the OV64A 64mp sensors with raw mipi output run about $18. But not sure if it would be easy to bring up the sensor and swallow that whole uncompressed framebuffer even on the chunky new ESPs with like, tens of megabytes of ram.

Are there sensor modules with a built in USB 2.0 PHY that would be appropriate? Newer MCUs have USB host and a few megabytes of memory, probably enough to store a high res jpeg or at least could flush half a framebuffer at a time.

So here's an alternative idea to this: We make one mothcam "lite" that can sell for like $140 which only have a cam on par with the pi cam v3 (12mp IMX708 75°), BUT researchers could buy 4 that somehow connect and sync to take a hyperresolution img of the mothsheet www.reddit.com/r/wigglegram...