Comment by jerich

I hacked together a tech demo of a personal project to add a Jetson Orin Nano to augment the Nikon autofocus system. (Camera->HDMI->Jetson processing->USB control->Camera)

https://github.com/jerich/jetson-face-af

It was a personal project to let Claude Code loose and have something to talk about on LinkedIn, hopefully to start a conversation about how to add some more advanced, more personal, functions to the powerful AF systems out there.

“Nikon AF does a great job of recognizing faces, but it doesn’t know which faces I care about.”

But I wanted to augment, not completely take over the camera; keep the Nikon shooting ergonomics intact.

Even the latest and greatest cameras will lag the processing power of something like a Jetson Nano, or even a mobile chipset, and cameras are meant to have lifetimes of years, so I think a smart camera manufacturer (hopefully Nikon) should add an easy external processing loop to let users add some extra smarts and automation.