Creator Sean Hodgins has published a new video detailing his creation of 'digiObscura,' a large boxy digital camera that features his own 1-kilopixel image sensor. The camera's creation involved 3D printing the camera body and soldering phototransistors on a custom printed circuit board alongside a pair of 32-bit analog multiplexers.
As you might expect, the 1KP images captured by digiObscura are very blocky and pixelated due to the camera's very low resolution, but it's an incredible look at what's possible with enough time, patience and knowledge.
In addition to the video above, the project is detailed on Instructables, where tools and components are listed. More detailed information, as well as firmware and other files, are available on the project's Github. Files for the 3D-printed components are available on Thingiverse.
About 80% of the coments miss the poit. Many other items I have I can hack, though vendors are more and more resticting that. I can still hack my PC enormously, replacing the hard drive, upgrading the CPU, memory AND MORE IMPORTANTLY changing the software.
But my camera is a closed box. Oh, I can swap lenses, but not alter any fundamentals. Sony develops new sensors, yes, but I can't swap them for my old one. I can't hack the software. Compared to commercial cameras this is primitive, but he has full control over everything. he now knows more about how sensors work, how the software can and does extract data, the algorithms to process, lots more than all except those who actually work for vendors. Yes, vendors release software updates for camera and lenses. Sometimes.
This is mind blowing. In a 20MP FF sensor, the pixel density per mm^2 is approx. 23,148 pixels (20 million pixels / 864mm^2). The surface area of 864mm^2 is derived from 36 x 24. You would need to shrink 23 of these kilo pixel sensors above to fill up the area that covers 1 square millimeter of a full frame sensor. The pixel density would increase the smaller the sensors and you need to cram more of these in a much smaller space.
Very interesting project nicely presented showing effort needed to make even a very low res digital camera. Too bad you have to endure so many stupid comments. Unfortunately that’s the state of our society today- an abundance of dumb people.
Well this is quite a task to build the camera from scratch, almost. Nowadays many people consider putting readily available parts together as 'building' something, no they are only assembly something ! many people say they build their own computer, I did so many times too, it was simply go to the shop to buy the motherboard, CPU, RAM, Drive, SSD, PSU.... and then put them together and connect the cables that's all ! hardly anyone of us really building something. But frankly we can't build each and every parts from scratch it is only possible in the factory, I consider building something as long as we do the soldering down to the component level, 3D print the casing and write our own program to run the thing. I consider Sean is building the camera coz he produce the sensor from parts, he 3D print the case...etc., and most importantly he knew all about electronics, optics and programming, so that if he own a factory he could really build something from scratch.
Although everyone seems to be criticizing this particular end result, who knows what this inventor might come up with. The French word is bricoleur and the result is bricolage. I'm reminded of the early days of Hewlet Packard and Apple when computer s were made in garages and what were doing now was a dream and also impossible with out the efforts of these eccentric early pioneers welding bits and pieces before actual silicon itself .
Seems like someone has raised kids to be ignorant adults with no use for life. Sad...... wait I can hear all the replies coming....but I will not indulge as it's not worth it and these kids will never understand what it's all about....sad!
Considering the size of the imaging chip, I'm kinda surprised that he didn't go for a 4x5" format. It could replace the film on a field camera, leading to a far more interesting (in my view) project. There haven't been many digital LF cameras...
When I was younger I made several projects like this one. Almost none resulted in anything useful. I made a very advanced darkroom exposure meter though. It saved me lots of time in the darkroom. I also made a 360 degree panoramic camera that worked just fine. Unfortunately I had no good way of making any prints from the long films, so I never really used it.
It is fun to do stuff. And most is useless as tools. Like this one. The image quality is a bit too poor. But, the guy has made something that develops himself.
Exactly - and you have to start somewhere, in any case. Consider where we are now with consumer digital cameras, then look at the imaging camera used in the Viking Mars Landers in the 1970s - it's basically a single-pixel camera.
Your image will be approximately 3mm square, with beautiful borders of 593mm on the long edge and 419mm on the short edge. Assuming you center the image, but that is of course up to you.
Excellent work, now all it needs is a colour wheel, and he'll have a DIY colour camera :) Probably better to do it that way, rather than adding a CFA to the sensor.
If he wants a true challenge, may I suggest microlenses :)
Yep, they became Heathkit Educational after 2008 and that lasted 4 years. A lot of the regional stores closed in the late 70's, early 80's. I still have a functional amateur radio transceiver and a linear amplifier, I built in '73. lol
Hey, I've got just the display for it! Although, at 476 pixels, you'd have to scroll around to see the entire 1024 image… something I built in the 1980s while working at Tektronix's Computer Research Laboratories:
/Users/jan/Pictures/• Annual Index/2010/2019/2019-12-30 LED Display/_A301820.JPG
When I worked at Tektronix Computer Research Laboratories in the 1980s, we were prying the lids off ceramic-package 16,384-bit RAM chips, focusing images on them, reading the results out, and displaying them. This was before Adobe Photoshop existed, and the most popular video display was 640x480!
To Trollshavethebestcandy. I feel sorry for those who have children. Years of ass wiping-diper changing, sleepless nights, money spending on cloths and then donating it to someone else, paying for education, worrying every minute what is happening and after all you have no idea who you are raising. 18 years of hell basically. It has nothing to do with maturity. It has a lot to do with a personal choice of self-sacrifice. So actually I feel sorry for those who have children.
Back in 1998 I bought Nikon's new F5 ("imported from the future") SLR which had an "exclusive 3D Color Matrix Metering using a new 1,005-pixel RGB sensor to read a scene's color as well as brightness and contrast." There was even an accessory that could download the entire record of 'images' that were measured.
Having done something similar with regular diodes (non-optical application) some years ago, I can understand that this sensor is a major labor sink. Congratulations to the maker for actually finishing this project! A few years ago I looked at large format sensors used in electronic x-ray applications. They had low resolution and lots of surface area, and could be used in 8x10 view cameras for example. Quite expensive, and low ISO if I remember correctly.
When do you see it? I remember asking the X-ray technician about it 20 years ago. And he showed me how x-rays were turned into light using a chemical layer on a plastic screen. It was picked up by Philips BW camera in HD.
Here is a link. This is about a TFT panel full of photosensors, rather than a TFT panel full of liquid crystal gates, as we have in our displays. http://atlas.physics.arizona.edu/~kjohns/downloads/scott/9805_dpix_tech_paper.pdf In the paper his pixel area is 127um and active area is 30x40 cm. It's big and flat. Spectral response indicates it works for our standard optical range so I assume a layer of scintillation phosphor covers it so it can be used for x-rays. I have no idea if this became a product.
I guesstimate the area of the sensor is around 40 square cm and assumed the pixel grid is 32x32 (1024 pixels). From there, my back of the napkin math says that scaling this design up to (a still monochrome) 50MP would give us a sensor area similar to the size of a regulation tennis singles court (~195 sq meters).
Yeah but it's a plastic mount so it's garbage. Real cameras have metal mounts. I also don't see a lens roadmap with some 2.8 zooms and 1.4 primes. This guy is a clown.
That article assumes that all photoreceptors (PR) in the human eye are equal. They are not. Less than 200000 PR are responsible for our "clear", "hi-res" vision and they are all clustered in a small area on the retina called the fovea*. You can test this by holding a piece of paper with large printed text in front of you. Focus on it and then move the paper left or right while maintaining the original focus point. You'll notice that you only have to move it a few degrees off center before it become illegible.
*the fovea is the point where our optic lens focuses on and the area that has the highest density of cone PRs
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