Adafruit + Raspberry Pi = DIY touchscreen Wi-Fi camera

 

 

If you've ever wanted to build your own camera, but aren't up for something quite as technical as, say, the Lux, how about turning to widely used and open source components? By hooking together the popular Raspberry Pi, its camera module, and a $35 touchscreen from Adafruit, you can build yourself a touchscreen camera with very little know-how required.

The instructions take you step by step through assembling this little camera, and it seems a remarkably straightforward build. You do have to be able to solder, unfortunately, to connect everything together. But other than that, all that's required is a handful of off the shelf parts, and the ability to follow instructions well enough to get the software installed and configured correctly. With the addition of a Wi-Fi adapter, you can even hook it directly to Dropbox, and have your images automatically transfer to your computer.

As the guide writer Phillip Burgess points out, this particular build is only the start of what you could do. As he explains:

• The camera board could be swapped out for the infrared-sensitive Pi NoIR camera.
• The Icon and Button classes in the cam.py script are pretty rudimentary, but might be sufficient for your own touchscreen applications (whether photography-related or otherwise).
• The camera code could be expanded to do new things. There are lots of camera settings we haven’t even touched. Other capabilities like a self-timer, intervalometer or motion detection could be added. Or capturing video.

If you're interested in getting your toes wet in DIY gadgetry, this simple, touchscreen, Wi-Fi enabled point and shoot might just be the way to do it.

(via Engadget, Raspberry Pi)