I had the pleasure of testing a pre-production spark camera on a commercial shoot last week, next to a phantom flex. The sensor seems very capable and the produced image very close from what you can achieve with the phantom cameras.
One main question remains after cruising the pixboom community forum : What about external control ?
I’m Moco operator and one feature we absolutely need on robots or big rigs is the capacity to trigger, review and change the camera settings for a distance, wired or wireless (preferably both, as one would be the other’s backup plan).
Is there any App (webapp or IOS) planned ? and if so what is the timeline for that feature to arrive to the units that are starting to arrive a the rental houses ?
Yes, R/S triggering is working, I currently use the Mutiny Power IO via the 3 pin Fischer port. This port has been tested with a Tilta M MK2 unit and the triggering system of a Bolt Robot.
Limited after mart options at this moment.
Waiting for Pixboom to soon release the Web portal access then they do have a whole mobile app planned for down the road. They have not said much about what the Web Portal will do however our guess is some sort of Live View, Controls set, Triggering etc
On my Spark, I enabled wifi and got it to assign me a ip address to my devices however no ports are open so it seems their internal web portal is just not started yet as I would likely have seen a Port 80 or 443 open.
Mutiny just dropped their new RS button for the Spark using the Native EXT port. and this cable can be extended via a simple 3.5mm cable if you need additional length. - BOLT-ON R/S Button FOR PIXBOOM SPARK - MUTINY
I’ve sorted the run stop via the 9pin ext port (pins 6 and 9, I think). At least, im not recording more than needed. For playback, I have to drive the bot to a convenient preset position (with a roll so the display is sideways and accessible) for playback.
I believe there is a workaround solution using UART protocol for playback control floating about but I’ve not gotten that far.