Released in 1998, the Game Boy camera was a bit ahead of its time. This specialized Game Boy cartridge featured a 128×128 pixel CMOS sensor and took 4-color greyscale photos. The camera even rotated, allowing for selfies years before that word existed.
The fixed lens on this camera meant no zoom was possible. [Bastiaan] decided to address this shortcoming by building a Canon EF Lens Mount. The resulting build looks hilarious, but actually takes some interesting photos.
[Bastiaan] designed the mount using Rhino 3D, and printed it out on a Monoprice 3D printer. After some light disassembly, the mount can be screwed onto the Game Boy Camera. With the massive 70-200 f4 lens and 1.4x extender shown here, the camera gets a max focal distance of just over 3000 mm.
One issue with the Game Boy Camera was the limited options for doing anything with the photos. They could be transferred to other Game Boy Camera cartridges, or printed using the Game Boy Printer. Fortunately, [Brian Khuu] has a modern day solution that emulates the Game Boy Printer using an Arduino. This lets you get PNG files out of the device.
I’ve never heard of Rhino 3D, but I’m always game to learn new tools. Does anyone have any thoughts for or against Rhino?
Actually, never mind. A single seat license for Rhino 3D costs $995. Now I’m wondering what Rhino is offering that could possibly be worth it, when so many cheaper options exist.
I think rhino is made for 3d movie productions etc. Not only 3d printing.
Rhino is mostly used for architecture and product design since it’s spline based. It’s also got a pretty interesting & powerful plugin called Grasshopper to make generative shapes.
I’ve been using Rhino 3D for about 15 years.
No good for animation and special effects and the like (leave that to 3DSMax, Maya, etc) but fantastic for architectural applications, industrial design, mechanical design, etc.
It’s also popular with boat designers, jewelerry designers, even shoes too.
I used to be a beta tester, and loved the intuitivity of the interface, it used to be especially adapted for nurbs ( https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/NURBS ) but since i had to pay for it i stopped using it ( not an every day user). Blender does the same and (a friggin hell of a lot ) more, but it’s less user friendly
One of the local universities uses it. I think it’s fairly intuitive for the students to pick up, although I personally haven’t used it. Price being one of the big reasons.
The student version is only $200.
You could sign up for a class as your local community college, get the cheap license, and still save a wad of money.
Shilling like a true shill
They say you should spend most of your money on glass, so a red-ringed Canon lens on a 2-bit sensor has to be close to ideal :-)
So you’re saying putting a single-pixel CMOS sensor on the back end of the Hubble would be an ideal camera?
sort of like radio telescopes.
Sure, but try finding a tripod that would hold it.
Actually, people use single pixel sensors (photodiode, photomultiplier) connected to a telescope for very accurate measurement of variable star magnitude. It works for a single star of course, and you have to re-aim the telescope to measure target star brightness, comparison star(s) brightness and sky brightness.
“4-color greyscale”??? Are those four colors black, white, grey and greyer?
No, white, grey, greyer, and very, very, very dark grey.
B^)
4 shades of grey if you will.
I will not.
Bit of a problem with portraying the famous Canon blue fringes I guess.
I guess it can be a school project where kids color in the blue fringes.
Am I the only one annoyed by the fact that, according to the referenced table on wiki, the crop factor should be 4500ish. A 3 point something square mm chip has a crop factor of ~15, not 10. But the whole project rocks anyway! All available thumbs up!
These are the kind of projects that I enjoy seeing here. Specialized knowledge, software and processes leading to hit an absolutely absurd end result out of the park. A bit worried about the robustness of that long lever arm but this is already a somewhat whimsical build anyway.
I wonder what happened if you were to mate up a more robust CMOS sensor to this. Could be a (small) market for really, really tiny sensors that actually had some resolution mated to actual glass.
I bought a zoom lens a year or two ago at Salvation Army on the off-chance it would fit my Pentax (potato!).
It didn’t.
So, an article like this has me thinking about hooking that lens[e] up to my Pi Zero W and camera!
Kudos for the “Cafe du Monde” tri—- Uh, unipod!
I imagine Pokemon Go’s AR mode is amazing on this.
“With the massive 70-200 f4 lens and 1.4x extender shown here, the camera gets a max focal distance of just over 3000 mm.”
Why not just say “3 metres”?
Because focal length is typically specified in mm – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_length
I had no idea this even existed! This is amazing! Do you have any examples of pictures actually taken with this?
Indeed, just follow the link : http://ekeler.com/game-boy-camera-canon-ef-mount/
Thank you!
It doesn’t have max focal length of 3000 mm. It has max equivalent focal length of 3000 mm. It’s a very big difference – equivalent focal length depends on actual focal length of lens and image sensor (or photographic material) size.
Logitech QuickCam, and a couple others, were all the rage last century… when we couldn’t afford ‘real’ digital cameras
Just wondering with this, how to avoid shake – I’d wire a remote to the A-button pads…
10/10 for OTT – over the top-ness