The camera, lens off to show the 1" sensor.

There’s Nothing Mini About This Mini Hasselblad-Style Camera’s Sensor

August 25, 2025 by Tyler August 10 Comments

When someone hacks together a digital camera with a Raspberry Pi, the limiting factor for serious photography is usually the sensor. No offense to the fine folks at the foundation, but even the “HQ” camera, while very good, isn’t quite professional grade. That’s why when photographer [Malcolm Wilson] put together this “Mini Hasselblad” style camera, he hacked in a 1″ sensor.

The sensor in question came in the form of a OneInchEye V2, from [Will Whang] on Tindie. The OneInch Eye is a great project in its own right: it takes a Sony IMX283 one-inch CMOS image sensor, and packages it with an IMU and thermal sensor on a board that hooks up to the 4-lane MIPI interface on the Raspberry Pi CM4 and Pi 5.

Sensor in hand, [Malcolm] needed but to figure out power and view-finding. Power is provided by a Geekworm X1200 battery hat. That’s the nice thing about the Pi ecosystem: with so many modules, it’s like LEGO for makers. The viewfinder, too, uses 4″ HDMI screen sold for Pi use, and he’s combined it with a Mamiya C220 TLR viewfinder to give that look-down-and-shoot effect that gives the project the “Mini Hasselblad” moniker.

These are a few images [Malcom] took with the camera. We’re no pros, but at least at this resolution they look good.

The steel-PLA case doesn’t hurt in that regard either, with the styling somewhat reminiscent of vintage film cameras. The “steel” isn’t just a colour in this case, and the metal actually makes the PLA conductive, which our photographer friend learned the hard way. Who hasn’t fried components on a surface they didn’t realize was conductive, though? We bet the added weight of the steel in the PLA makes this camera much nicer to hold than it would be in plain plastic, at least.

The OneInchEye module came set up for C-mount lenses, and [Malcolm] stuck with that, using some Fujinon TV lenses he already had on hand. [Malcolm] has released STL files of his build under a Creative Commons NonCommercial license, but he’s holding the code back for subscribers to his Substack.

This isn’t the first Pi-based camera we’ve seen from [Malcolm], and there’ve been quite a few others on these pages over the years. There was even a Hackaday version, to test out the “official” module [Malcolm] eschewed.

An Open Source Mirrorless Camera You’d Want To Use

October 5, 2024 by Jenny List 18 Comments

Making a digital camera is a project that appears easy enough, but it’s one whose complexity increases depending on the level to which a designer is prepared to go. At the simplest a Raspberry Pi and camera module can be stuck in a 3D printed case, but in that case, the difficult work of getting the drivers and electronics sorted out has already been done for you.

At the other end of the scale there’s [Wenting Zhang]’s open source mirrorless digital camera project, in which the design and construction of a full-frame CCD digital camera has been taken back to first principles. To understand the scale of this task, this process employs large teams of engineers when a camera company does it, and while it’s taken a few years and the software isn’t perhaps as polished as your Sony or Canon, the fact it’s been done at all is extremely impressive.

Inside is a Kodak full-frame sensor behind the Sony E-mount lens, for which all the complex CCD timing and acquisition circuitry has been implemented. The brains of the show lie in a Xilinx Zynq ARM-and-FPGA in a stack of boards with a power board and the CCD board. The controls and battery are in a grip, and a large display is on the back of the unit.

We featured an earlier version of this project last year, and this version is a much better development with something like the ergonomics, control, and interface you would expect from a modern consumer camera. The screen update is still a little slow and there are doubtless many tweaks to come, but this really feels close to being a camera you’d want to try. There’s an assembly video which we’ve placed below the break, feast your eyes on it.

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Designing A Quality Camera Slider Can Be Remarkably Satisfying

May 15, 2024 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

Camera sliders are great creative tools, letting you get smooth controlled shots that can class up any production. [Anthony Kouttron] decided to build one for an engineering class, and he ended up mighty satisfied with what he and his team accomplished.

As an engineering class project, this wasn’t a build done on a whim. Instead, [Anthony] and his fellow students spent plenty of time hashing out what they needed this thing to do, and how it should be built. An Arduino was selected as the brains of the operation, as a capable and accessible microcontroller platform. Stepper motors and a toothed belt drive were used to move the slider in a controllable fashion. The slider’s control interface was an HD44780-based character LCD, along with a thumbstick and two pushbuttons. The slider relied on steel tubes for a frame, which was heavy, but cost-effective and easy to fabricate. Much of the parts were salvaged from legendary e-waste bins on the university grounds.

The final product was stout and practical. It may not have been light, but the steel frame and strong stepper motor meant the slider could easily handle even heavy DSLR cameras. That’s something that lighter builds can struggle with.

Ultimately, it was an excellent learning experience for [Anthony] and his team. As a bonus, he got some great timelapses out of it, too. Video after the break.

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A Mouse Becomes A Camera

January 29, 2024 by Jenny List 24 Comments

If your pointing device is a mouse, turn it over. The chances are you’ll see a red LED light if you’re not seriously old-school and your mouse has a ball, this light serves as the illumination for a very simple camera sensor. The mouse electronics do their thing by looking for movement in the resulting image, but it should be possible to pull out the data and repurpose the sensor as a digital camera. [Doctor Volt] has a new video showing just that with the innards of a Logitech peripheral.

The mouse contains a microcontroller and the camera part, which fortunately has an SPI interface. The correct register to query the sensor information was deduced, and as if my magic, an image appeared. An M12 lens provided focus with a handy 3D printed mount, and the board went back into the mouse case as a housing. The pictures have something of the Game Boy camera about them, being low-res and monochrome, but it’s still a neat hack.

If you’d like to give it a go you can find the code in a GitHub repository. You might find it worth finding a gaming mouse though, for the much higher resolution sensor.

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Use Your Old SLR As A Digital Camera?

October 9, 2023 by Jenny List 43 Comments

Back in the late 1990s as the digital revolution overtook photography there were abortive attempts to develop a digital upgrade for 35mm film cameras. Imagine a film cartridge with attached sensor, the idea went, which you could just drop into your trusty SLR and continue shooting digital. As it happened they never materialised and most film SLRs were consigned to the shelf. So here in 2023 it’s a surprise to find an outfit called I’m Back Film promising something very like a 35mm cartridge with an attached sensor.

The engineering challenges are non-trivial, not least that there’s no standard for distance between reel and exposure window, and there’s next-to-no space at the focal plane in a camera designed for film. They’ve solved it with a 20 megapixel Micro Four Thirds sensor which gives a somewhat cropped image, and what appears to be a ribbon cable that slips between the camera back and the body to a box which screws to the bottom of the camera. It’s not entirely clear how they solve the reel-to-window distance problem, but we’re guessing the sensor can slide from side to side somehow.

It’s an impressive project and those of us who shot film back in the day can’t resist a bit of nostalgia for our old rigs, but we hope it hasn’t arrived too late. Digital SLRs are ubiquitous enough that anyone who wants one can have one, and meanwhile the revival in film use has given many photographers a fresh excuse to use their old camera the way it was originally intended. We’ll soon see whether it catches on though — the crowdsourcing campaign for the project will be starting in a few days.

Oddly this isn’t the first such project we’ve seen, though it is the first with a usable-size sensor.

SLR To DSLR Conversion Becomes Full Camera

August 22, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 8 Comments

At least as far as the inner workings are concerned, there’s not a whole lot of difference between an single-lens reflex (SLR) camera that uses film and a digital SLR (DSLR) camera that uses an electronic sensor except the method for capturing the image. So adding the digital image sensor to a formerly analog camera like this seemed like an interesting project for [Wenting Zhang]. But this camera ballooned a little further than that as he found himself instead building a complete, full-frame digital camera nearly from scratch.

The camera uses a full-frame design and even though the project originally began around the SLR mechanism, in the end [Wenting] decided not to keep this complex system in place. Instead, to keep the design simple and more accessible a mirrorless design is used with an electronic viewfinder system. It’s also passive M lens mount, meaning that plenty of manual lenses will be available for this camera without having to completely re-invent the wheel.

As far as the sensor goes, [Wenting] wanted something relatively user-friendly with datasheets available so he turned to industrial cameras to find something suitable, settling on a Kodak charge-coupled device (CCD) for the sensor paired with an i.MX processor. All of the electronics have publicly-available datasheets which is important for this open-source design. There’s a lot more work that went into this build than just picking parts and 3D printing a case, though, and we’d definitely recommend anyone interested to check out the video below for how this was all done. And, for those who want to go back to the beginnings of this project and take a different path, it’s definitely possible to convert an analog SLR to a digital one.

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A Digital Camera For The 1984 Market

August 14, 2023 by Jenny List 17 Comments

Digital cameras are a ubiquitous consumer and professional product here in 2023, and because of the wide availability of parts it’s relatively straightforward to construct one for yourself. Four decades ago though, film was king, but that hasn’t stopped [Georg Lukas] from building a digital camera for the 1984 market. The hardware is definitely from recent years, the extremely affordable ESP32-cam board that many of us will have worked with already. Meanwhile the 1984 part lies in the recording format, it makes EGA 16-colour low-res pictures and stores them in the archaic TGA file format.

A low-res camera is fun, but there are two other angles on this which are definitely worth some time. The first is that his description and code are worth a read for anyone with an interest in programming an ESP32 camera, while the second invites us to consider whether such a camera could have been made using parts available in 1984. We remember camera peripherals for 8-bit microcomputers which were a C-mount lens positioned over a decapped RAM chip, and thus we can’t help wondering whether an RGB split to three of those sensors could have been constructed. Whether a 6502 or a Z80 with 64k of memory could have processed the three images into one is another matter, but at least if any of you want to try there’s a handy 1984 computer still popping up on eBay.