I Built a Stereo Vision Board for Hardware Hackers

Ryan Walker built a low-cost stereo vision board intended for robotics and hardware experimentation. It uses Rockchip’s RV1103, a 1.1 GHz ARM Cortex-A7 system-on-chip with 64 MB of RAM, paired with two cameras and Linux support. The board can send data over serial for use by another controller or operate as a standalone Linux device, with USB-C networking available. Its four-layer PCB routes high-speed USB, MIPI camera, and Ethernet signals. The first version worked with a few design mistakes, including an initially incorrect chip, undersized lens-mount holes, dim indicator LEDs, and a thin power trace.

The software is built with Buildroot, which packages the bootloader, Linux kernel, drivers, and system image. Because some camera, accelerator, and MIPI support comes from Rockchip’s vendor software rather than upstream Linux, the project relies on those components alongside standard Video4Linux interfaces. A userspace program configures the cameras, captures images, and uses Rockchip’s video engine and its hardware sum-of-absolute-differences accelerator. For depth estimation, the system compares small image patches from the two horizontally separated cameras, shifting one image until corresponding patches match; the required shift indicates distance, with nearer objects needing larger shifts. The builder hopes to gauge demand for a small production run and, if interest grows, improve the software and pursue image optimisation, SLAM, and object detection with YOLO.