Camera support on Fairphone 4 with postmarketOS is coming to you very soon!

All 3 cameras are supported, main rear camera, ultra-wide camera and front camera.

And all with a completely open source software stack of course!

#postmarketOS #LinuxMobile #MobileLinux #libcamera #Fairphone #Fairphone4 #Cat #Caturday

@z3ntu

thank you for this 🎉

@z3ntu i have a feeling that the Cat is a crucial part of the development process

@gravitos 100% cat-driven development!

@z3ntu

Impressive!

That's amazing news thank you !

@z3ntu nice! is there autofocus support / is it planned? I know that NekoCWD wrote one for the OP6(T), don't think it's merged into libcamera yet.

@QuadRadical Definitely but it's not there yet. One rear cam has DW9800W (should not be difficult to get working, just checking how to implement it properly) and the other some Onsemi IC (iirc it's one register write for init, and then writing one register for position).

OIS for the main cam won't come soon though, nothing's implemented in any layer of the stack yet for that.

@z3ntu amazing work! Well done and thank you!

@z3ntu what about that third night vision IR camera thingy on the back? I mean software support for this is probably non existent on Linux but still would be interesting what data comes out of it...

@j_r The third circle is essentially a distance sensor that is used for auto focus, not a camera.

@j_r The downstream driver is enormous and I'm honestly not interested enough to start working on a driver for it.

@z3ntu oh okay interesting, why does Fairphone market it as the "super night mode" then? When it's basically just there to assist autofocus?

@j_r There is a night mode in the camera afaik, but it's definitely not advertised on connection with the third circle.

@z3ntu very nice! Just bought the FP5 for Ubuntu Touch, but now I want a FP4 :D

@jarno FP5 still works better, apart from the main cam not working there ;)

@z3ntu Thanks a lot! It seems like the battery level reporting works for you or am I mistaken? How is that?

@jbaersaft Good eye! It's a work in progress, but should also be enabled soon :) There's currently a merge request in pmaports open where you can test it, so far it has gotten quite good feedback.

@z3ntu Does it mean support with libcamera or with specifically tailored application (as it is in Librem5, unless you patch libcamera) ?

@bhyoram Regular GNOME camera or Plasma camera just work, libcamera doesn't need any patches to work (though some addition of tuning for the sensors would likely improve quality quite a bit)

@z3ntu Very cool! Until now, the battery has only died me once as the battery life is quite impressive, but I generally like to know it's charge :)
I am not so familiar with how all of this works so please apologise my question: does it affect to the current charging speed limit?

@jbaersaft Charging should go faster with these changes, I think I've set the limit to 1.5A which should be plenty fast (still slower than downstream but there's not really thermal mitigation yet to manage charging speed based on temperature)

@QuadRadical @z3ntu There's also AF support for Millipixels, Megapixels and Clicks machine, to mention a few. Last one can do PDAF. But there's a lot of difference between "AF support" and "good AF support".

@z3ntu @jbaersaft Slower charging also means battery lifetime is longer. Limiting charge to 80% is even more important. I have some experiments at https://github.com/pavelmachek/unicsy_demo/tree/master/bat and elsewhere.

@z3ntu If I understand things correctly, that's a very good news for OnePlus 6, too? And maybe a TODO item for me, as Droidian is likely not going to work for these experiments.

@z3ntu Amazing ! Does audio, battery, and call also works well ? It says it doesn't on the postmarketos website, it would be awesome if it works well too !

@Flutterbrony Check the device page in the postmarketOS wiki, but in short there's plenty of stuff that's not working yet.

@pavel I don't think this is changing anything for the OnePlus 6, different SoC and probably different camera sensors, and most cameras there work already?

@pavel @jbaersaft Charge limiting should work here as well, but not sure which exact sysfs file

@z3ntu Aha, so my recall was that problem with OnePlus6 was not sensors, but phy inside the SoC, and that it was common problem accross Qualcomm chips. Look like I was wrong.

@pavel One OnePlus 6 camera is connected with C-PHY instead of D-PHY, but on FP4 all 3 cams are D-PHY so no change for that was necessary

@z3ntu Aha, that's it, thanks. If you want video recording & autofocus, take a look here: https://gitlab.com/tui/tui/-/tree/master/ccam?ref_type=heads . It can also take photos, some work will be required.

I wonder how easy is it to get Fairphone 4 in czech republic?

@pavel It was sold there in the past so 2nd hand marketplaces should have it. Not sure you can still get it new anywhere, it's end of sales since a while. But Fairphone 5 also works much better with postmarketOS so that's a better idea to buy

@z3ntu Ok, so apparently it is possible to buy Fairphone 5 and 6 new here, for similar prices (cca EUR600). Second-hand Fairphone 5 may be available for ~EUR400, and new Fairphone 4 may be available for ~EUR300.

Having main camera available with open-source drivers sounds very cool and may be reason for Fairphone 4 ... unless same is true for the newer models...?

@pavel I'd still strongly recommend FP5 over FP4. Main cam shouldn't be too far away on FP5 given other people are looking into getting C-PHY working, and once it's working on one device, it should start working on all. And then it's just a bit of sensor bringup on FP5 to have that working.

And just many other factors are so much better on FP5 compared to FP4.

@z3ntu @pavel
The Faiphone 4 is still available new and even comes with a 5-year guarantee for €199,- when registered. I bought this to experiment
https://www.freenet-mobilfunk.de/handys-smartphones/fairphone/fairphone-4-ohne-vertrag/p/P-M-3328277?dcl=smartphones&ds=P-3402858&fl=device&ng=true

@z3ntu Does is use software IPA ?

@bhyoram Yes the regular software ISP that's in libcamera. But everything's automatic so no manual work is necessary, it just works :)

@z3ntu understood. What i meant was to ask if the libcamera IPA (ISP) that is used is one that utilizes HW (ipa_<hw>) processing or the pure software implementation (aka ipa_soft_simple).

@bhyoram Not sure for that one honestly. Should be the same that's also used for any other Qualcomm SoC currently.