Raspberry Pi 5 GMSL2 Camera HAT Reaches 10 Meters

Long Coax Runs Come to the Pi Camera Stack

BE-IIS — Brechel Electronic-Industrial Interface Systems — has released a dual GMSL2 camera HAT for the Raspberry Pi 5, and the specification that matters is distance. The board has been tested with two cameras running over 10-metre coaxial cables, which is roughly an order of magnitude beyond what the Pi's flat ribbon CSI cables tolerate.

• Deserializer: Analog Devices MAX96716A, converting two GMSL2 serial inputs to the Pi's dual MIPI CSI-2 ports
• Validated mode: 2304 x 1296, RAW10, two CSI-2 lanes per camera, using Sony IMX708 sensors
• Connectors: Rosenberger FAKRA coax, with links rated up to 6 Gbps each
• Price: $229 for the HAT on Tindie or $300 on Lectronz, plus serializer boards at $79 or $100 each

Why Does Cable Length Matter So Much on a Pi?

Anyone who has built a Pi vision project knows the ceiling. The standard CSI ribbon is good for about 30 to 50 cm before signal integrity falls apart, and the practical consequence is architectural: the compute has to live next to the lens. On a robot, that means a Pi bolted to a gimbal. On a machine that inspects something, it means a controller mounted inside the enclosure where the heat and the vibration are.

GMSL2 — Gigabit Multimedia Serial Link, the automotive standard Analog Devices developed for exactly this problem — moves serialized video over a single coax at up to several Gbps with deterministic low latency. Cars use it because a camera in a wing mirror needs to reach a computer in the boot. The same reasoning applies the moment a Pi project outgrows a single chassis.

The IMX708 choice is a nice touch, because that is the same 12MP sensor in the official Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3. Anyone who has already tuned an image pipeline against that sensor keeps their work and just gains ten metres of reach.

What Does the Software Side Look Like?

This is where these boards usually fall down. GMSL deserializers typically need out-of-tree kernel drivers and device tree overlays, which in practice means maintaining a custom kernel and re-doing it every time Raspberry Pi OS moves.

BE-IIS ships a bash installer that handles the kernel modules, patches and device tree overlay without a full kernel rebuild, and the result works with the standard tooling — rpicam-hello and friends behave normally. The installer is published openly on GitHub. That is the difference between a board you evaluate and a board you deploy.

Who Is This Actually For?

The pricing answers that. A complete two-camera setup runs $229 plus two $79 serializers, so about $387 before sensors and cable. That is well past hobby-project money and squarely in the territory of industrial vision, robotics, automotive prototyping, stereo rigs and remote camera installations — the cases where the alternative is an industrial frame grabber costing several times more.

It slots neatly alongside the Aliensense NXS sensor board we covered in August, which took the same long-cable approach for robot sensor data. The pattern across both is a single-board computer being asked to behave like a distributed system, with the sensors where the work is and the compute somewhere cooler and safer. For more boards in this class, see our mini computer coverage and the recent NeoEyes NE302 edge AI camera.

Sources: CNX Software — September 17, 2026; BE-IIS product listing on Lectronz — September 2026.