7. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

7.1. Why can’t I view the preview in the browser?

There are numerous reasons for choosing to use HDMI for the video preview. The major one is simplicity: this was by far the quickest and simplest way of getting the project working. It’s also trivial for the user to setup, provides perfect video quality and near-instant feedback of actions on the microscope.

Streaming over the LAN means dealing with encoding, client codecs, network bandwidth, latency, the list goes on - and of course the result will never be as good as the straight HDMI feed.

This is not to say that an in-browser preview isn’t something that’s being considered for the future but it simply wasn’t a priority for the first version.

7.2. Why can’t I control everything from the Pi?

Again, simplicity. Building an application on the Pi that has an interface and provides the live video interface means dealing with GPU coding (in order to get reasonable preview quality and latency). Relying on a separate machine running a web-browser to render the interface was the simplest method.