8-bit Digital Photo Gun

One of the first popular mass-produced digital cameras was the Game Boy camera, a terrible black and white image sensor stuck inside a highly modified Game Boy cartridge. With a Game Boy, the camera, and the Game Boy printer, it was able to produce low-resolution but still surprisingly usable images. Combine all these parts together with the best of hacker art from [vtol] and what do you get? The Game Boy Instant Photo Gun.

There aren’t many details for this build, but it looks like this is an uncased Game Boy Brick, a Game Boy camera, and Game Boy Printer assembled into something that looks dangerous and won’t get past a TSA checkpoint. That might be fixed by repurposing an old NES zapper.

We’ve seen [vtol]’s work before with a machine that probably doesn’t steal your credit card info, a levitating speaker, and something that doesn’t reference [Tarkovsky] enough. This build is right up there with the rest of them.

Thanks [Itay] for the link.

23 thoughts on “8-bit Digital Photo Gun

  1. > Moscow media-artist,
    He ist not from the US. Chances are the cops he will be facing will not directly shot him out of fear.

    Inb4: I’m naive, But your’s is the nation with arms to the teeth that makes your cops/citizen that jumpy. Where I come from kids can play with toyguns without getting shot. (I can see how this will get some replys).

    1. US cops aren’t jumpy because of guns, they’re alienated from the populations they’re supposed to be protecting, militarized, and systemically racist. On top of that, they operate in a society that concentrates poverty into ghettos that normalize criminal behavior (because there frequently aren’t viable alternatives), and produce a vicious cycle where poor areas can’t scratch together the funding to run good schools, leading to poor people not having access to the level of education that could allow them to pull themselves up.

      The problems faced by the US are far worse than you imagine, but they are also *dramatically* more complex.

        1. Sometimes they even spend it, and be it for a multi million dollar yacht. And the building of such a ship employs many people. Only Dagobert Duck hoards all of his gold just to bath in it. :-)

      1. Bingo. I work in a city that has all of those problems (and more).

        The population here is 75% minorities. The government, police force, fire department, DPW, etc. are all 95% white. There’s no tax base because of large tax-free organizations owning maybe 35-40% of the most valuable land, and an extra ~20% is abandoned (non-tax-paying property.

        The end result is most everyone here is stuck in poverty and can’t pull themselves out of it because the education system is shite (lack of funding), and they’re stuck living on welfare with four generations of their family in a crumbling brownstone. If you’re white, you might get lucky and get out of here. Good luck if you’re any shade of brown– try selling weed on the corner.

        Welcome to America.

        1. I’m going to tell you a surprising thing: A person can actually be white and NOT be a racist, and not seek to kill people of other color. Even when in a large group with other white people.

          Don’t just talk like some simplistic news person or politician or activist trying to score points.

          As for the supposed impossibility for black people in amercia to get anywhere, well reality is rather challenging that isn’t is? The president, 2 out of 3 sportspersons, every second musician, all rich and black. And if as you do include anybody with any tint it gets even mor dramatically untenable, freaking CEO’s left and right including people running google and microsoft are non-white folks.

          But sure, there are poor back neighborhoods and yes if in that situation it becomes hard to pull yourself out of that, or to get the support to get the education to do so, no doubt. But don’t draw that to some universal thing.

          And last but not least, there are entire states in the US where the white population is shit-poor and have the same issues, people who have to do with half a meal because they can’t scrape enough together to even feed themselves properly.

      2. The war on drugs is why the police in the US are militarized.
        It’s a case of where the cure the was much worse then the condition as it has done much more damage then the social problem of drug addiction it was supposed to cure.

  2. “a terrible black and white image sensor” That sensor was a Mitsubishi M64282FP, with on chip image processing, such as edge detection, and extraction. It was pretty easy to connect it to an 8-bit MCU, and a a medium speed, 8-bit ADC. Still a suitable and affordable option for today.

    1. Thank you for stepping up to defend the sensor. People should realize that the machine vision options of that chip have never been properly exploited. The M6428FP has always been one of my favorite ‘what if’ chips.

  3. Hard to tell with the TSA really, I hear stories about people walking on planes with swords and what not and at the same time stories about nail-clippers getting people in trouble.

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