

Bigshot: The Camera for Education.  DIY Digital Camera Construction - ghshephard
http://www.bigshotcamera.com/

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ChuckMcM
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)

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sbierwagen
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.

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apu
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](http://www.bigshotcamera.com/experience)

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

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SingAlong
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.

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ra88it
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]

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cclogg
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...](http://www.collection-
appareils.fr/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=8822&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&sid=b8f83b174e52cdb471abc0c001280570&start=25)
... making a film SLR from scratch basically. Though he appears to be very
talented/handy to put together something like that heh.

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grandmaster789
This reminds me of another DIY digital camera project based around the
raspberry pi camera module - [http://robofun.ro/create/the-sprite-raspberrypi-
camera/](http://robofun.ro/create/the-sprite-raspberrypi-camera/)

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prawn
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/](http://galileoscope.org/)

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yapsody
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.

