Next, it was time to modify the powder compact. After a quick test to ensure it operated correctly with Fedora, I went about stripping the case to examine the size of the electronics. Soon, I'd acquired a generic HD resolution webcam for a mere £1 plus shipping. The obvious answer was to head over to a well-known internet auction site and bid on some secondhand webcams. Spending £30 on a camera to use with a £4 computer board just feels unbalanced. Given that the Pi Zero retails for £4 in the UK, I wanted other parts of the project to be priced similarly. Since I already had the Raspberry Pi Zero in hand, I needed a webcam for this project. The digital pinhole camera, created from a Raspberry Pi Zero, HD webcam, and empty powder compact, was the first project in an ongoing series of pinhole cameras I built. My goal for the digital pinhole webcam was to stay true to pinhole photography traditions and build a minimalist device with no controls at all, not even exposure time. Digital cameras, by contrast, have 20 or more buttons and hundreds more settings buried in menus. It only took a minute with the GNOME Cheese application to verify that a pinhole webcam was indeed a viable idea.įrom this seed of an idea, I had a way to use one of my Raspberry Pi Zeros! The pinhole cameras that people build are typically minimalistic, offering no controls other than the exposure duration and film's ISO rating. I wondered whether the webcam had good enough low-light performance to capture an image from behind the pinhole body cap. Quite by chance, one day this pinhole body cap was sitting on my desk next to the modified astrophotography webcam. Whitepaper: Data-intensive intelligent applications in a hybrid cloud blueprintĮven before that, I had turned my film SLR camera into a pinhole camera by drilling a hole in a body cap (the cap that protects a camera's internal workings when it doesn't have a lens attached) and covering it in a thin disc cut from a soda can, pierced with a needle to provide a pinhole.eBook: Running Kubernetes on your Raspberry Pi.Getting started with Raspberry Pi cheat sheet.

Pi zero camera setup