Constructing the worst digital digicam ever

Digital cameras work by letting mild by way of a lens onto a sensor composed of photosites, every with a photodiode that outputs a sign relative to the brightness of the sunshine. Trendy digital digicam sensors have thousands and thousands of photosites, every of which comprises a microscopic photodiode. The variety of pixels within the captured picture is the same as the variety of photodiodes. To display that idea, Electromechanical Productions used an Arduino to construct “the worst digital digicam of all time ever.”

Photodiodes alone can’t detect shade, solely brightness. Skilled and client digital cameras incorporate shade filters and algorithms to interpolate shade. However on this case, the image is black and white. This “digicam” doesn’t make the most of shade filters and doesn’t also have a lens. It additionally solely has a decision of 8 x 6 — 48 pixels in whole. Every of these photosites is a straightforward photoresistor, which is a part with a variable resistance proportional to the depth of the sunshine that hits it.

Electromechanical Productions used an Arduino Nano board to measure the brightness detected by every of these photoresistors. The Nano doesn’t have sufficient analog enter pins to deal with 48 photoresistors, so a collection of multiplexer chips allow consecutive measurements. The measurement course of is quick sufficient that this doesn’t have a detrimental impact right here, because the image high quality is so poor anyway. After gathering the array of brightness values, the Arduino sends the info to a pc that runs a Python script to attract a grid of rectangles representing every pixel.

The ensuing picture is so poor that it’s tough to make out even the best shapes, however that is nonetheless an attention-grabbing academic venture that helps to clarify how digital cameras work. It could be doable to extend the decision by including extra photoresistors, however there’s solely a lot one can do with parts of this measurement.