Bigshot: The Camera for Education. DIY Digital Camera Construction | Hacker News Reader

Bigshot: The Camera for Education. DIY Digital Camera Construction

bigshotcamera.com

36 pointsghshephard11 comments

This is a really cool camera. The only thing that would make it "perfect" would be to have the firmware for the camera be hackable. If you have ever played with the Canon Hacking kit (CHSDK) for their point and shoot cameras, you can can do amazing things (like interesting time lapse things, or motion sensors different compression schemes etc etc)

Looking at the documentation, it seems shooting photos is exclusively automatic: there's no way to change EV, shutter speed or aperture, which is disappointing. The "educational" bit only extends as far as putting the camera together, once it's complete it's a total black box, like an older cellphone camera.

This is a really cool project from my former PhD lab. It's a camera kit that teaches kids how cameras work by letting them assemble one themselves. The website [1] includes a lot of educational material describing how and why each component works, along with interactive animations.

The camera itself is also interesting in that it contains a few different "computational imaging" lens-systems within: normal, wide-angle, and stereo, "all-in-one". See [2] for a description of what computational imaging means in general. I'm happy to try to answer any questions (this wasn't my project, but I did play around with one).

[1] http://www.bigshotcamera.com/experience

[2] http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/what_is/

Hey apu,

Do you have any info on APIs available to use Bigshot camera features by programming?

Anything generic that doesn't use gphoto would be awesome.

I've been dreaming about this for so many years. A DIY digital camera, back to the basics of lens and sensor.

They are shipping now? Has anybody purchased one?

[edit: I guess I should have googled a bit to see that this isn't the first DIY digital camera kit commercially available]

[edit: "Low battery? Just rotate the hand crank a few times and continue to shoot your photos!" - that's also pretty cool if it works, I missed that feature in the OLPC that shipped]

I agree, the crank is really cool!

On the subject of DIY cameras, I always thought this guy had such a cool post: http://www.collection-appareils.fr/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=37... ... making a film SLR from scratch basically. Though he appears to be very talented/handy to put together something like that heh.

I just ordered one and it says "Ships by Aug 12". (No way of verifying that until I get a tracking number, but I'm hopeful)

Best part about the "Low Battery" part is that it spends a lot of time on the site talking about the Power Generator - Not just at a "Turn Crank" level, but down to the gears, gearbox, dynamo, electromagnetism level.

This reminds me of another DIY digital camera project based around the raspberry pi camera module - http://robofun.ro/create/the-sprite-raspberrypi-camera/

Could the same concept (DIY, education) be applied to many other regularly used gadgets at a similar pricepoint?

Bit like the Galileoscope: http://galileoscope.org/

Great project. It will help kids to increase there knowledge while playing. Great way to teach kids how camera works and giving them a great insight into the working of camera in a playful way.

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