Raspberry Pi moves forward with $25 camera; 10 units to be given away in competition

 

 

Earlier this year, we covered a development from micro-computer maker Raspberry Pi that a low-cost digital camera module was in the works. Now, the camera board is all but finished, and Raspberry Pi is holding a competition to get some of these bare-bones, imaging modules out into the hands of the community to really put them to the test.

When the Raspberry Pi camera board becomes widely available, you’ll be able to purchase one for $25, and it will be able to capture 5-megapixel still images, and 1080p video at 30fps. Raspberry Pi is looking to perform some substantial pre-production testing on the camera units, so they’re giving away ten of them to the Pi users who can come up with the most interesting and imaginative uses for the camera, in order to see how the little unit will function.

In a blog post, they describe the contest with the following:

“The reason we’re giving these cameras away is that we want you to help us to do extra-hard testing. We want the people we send these boards to to do something computationally difficult and imaginative with them, so that the cameras are pushed hard in the sort of bonkers scheme that we’ve seen so many of you come up with here before with your Pis, and so that we can learn how they perform (and make adjustments if necessary). The community here always seems to come up with applications for the stuff we do that we wouldn’t have thought of in a million years; we thought we should take advantage of that.”

The competition is only open March 12, and the cameras are expected to be available for purchase in April. So that only really gives a month for this the Raspberry Pi camera module to be field tested. But knowing how active the maker community behind the Raspberry Pi is, they'll likely figure out something wonderful (or ludicrous) to do with these little cameras in the meantime.

(Via Ars Technica and PetaPixel)