Antique Raspberry Pi Camera

So, sometime ago I was out on a field trip with the family when we chanced upon a fun little antique store seemingly in the middle of nowhere. One of the items that we found was this beautiful antique “brownie” camera. The Brownie camera line were Kodak cameras that were, essentially a camera in a cardboard box. They were a long running line and incredibly popular. The camera that I came across was a Brownie, but instead of being a simple box, had an extendable bellows.

This little guy was pretty beat up (still is) and had a hole in the bellows, which rendered it unable to perform proper film photography. You can see the hole right before the shutter release button in the front of the camera.

The shutter release is a marvel unto it self, and I still gaze upon it in wonder. It’s over 100 years and it still works. It controls the aperture size, shutter release, and exposure time. It’s over 100 years old.

And it works. Some things were built to last.

I immediately fell in love with this camera and felt that if it couldn’t be used as a film camera, it could certainly be used as a digital camera! All it would take is some TLC and the addition of a raspberry pi! Yet, as simple as this sounded, there would be a surprisingly large number of issues to tackle to get it to work.

What I would need to do to accomplish such a feat:

1. Configure the Raspberry Pi with the camera attachment.
2. Attach the camera to the inside of the shutter release.
3. Identify a way to instruct the Pi to take a picture.
4. Save it. And for fun, convert it to sepia format.

Steps 1 and 2 were easy. For step 2 I literally just used tape to attach the camera in place. Low-tech, definitely, but I am a big proponent of simple solutions.

Step 3 was a little more problematic. I certainly knew, and know, how to get the pi to take a picture when logged in via the command line, but now I needed some form of external, physical shutter release. The solution I came up with was a low and high tech combination; it involved using the Pi’s GPIO pins, a breadboard, shutter release, and some legos.

I removed the internal spindle in the camera that would have held the film and jury-rigged inside it the breadboard with a button on it to act as the shutter release. I had a shutter release cable that neatly fit through the hole in the top of the camera (that held the spindle) and then, to make the connection, used some legos and wine corks to hold it all together.

Two dupont cables were used to connect the breadboard to the GPIO cables. When the manual shutter release is depressed, it presses on the lego, which presses the button, which completes the circuit and instructs the Pi to do something. The something, in this case, was to take a picture.

The next issue I came across was how to configure the Pi to load the script as an active program upon boot time. I didn’t want to need to log in via ssh every time it booted up because, for starters, the IP Address of the Pi could change every bootup and, more importantly, if the entire camera was mobile, it may not even be able to connect to a wireless AP (more on this later).

I had, initially, written a number of python scripts and created a daemon out of them to do what I want, but I ultimately felt it was a little cludgey and I didn’t like it. I then decided not to reinvent the wheel but to use a framework that already existed instead.

Node-RED to the rescue! Node-RED is an awesome utility, written in javascript and run on node-js, which was originally intended for Internet of Things applications. It works for my camera which, I suppose, is now an IoT device.

Being a flow-based utility, one can “program” a Node-RED flow by dragging and dropping “nodes,” or pre-packaged instructions, onto a palette. It has hooks into the Pi’s features, such as controlling the GPIO ports and camera, which make it ideal for my purpose. Here is was my camera flow looks like for troubleshooting purposes. In “production,” the flow from PIN 18 will be connected:

And this works! Node-RED runs automatically upon bootup and the camera is ready to start taking pictures. My python script to convert to Sepia is put right in the flow, so all pictures look as if they were actually from a proper time period Brownie camera.

To ensure I do not run out of drive space on the Pi, I used Node-RED again to build a realtime dashboard showing basic Pi-health stats:

Finally, I installed a lightweight web-server to serve the images, so they can be browsed from any web browser.

Aha! But, you might ask, how would I reach the camera’s web page if I don’t know it’s IP Address, or if it doesn’t know how to connect to the nearest AP? I tackled this issue by configured the Pi as it’s own adhoc wireless point:

Any device which can connect via adhoc wireless will be able to browse to the webpage to see the pictures. (And yes, I have named my home wifi “Bob 2.0”).

I’ve had so much fun with this that I’ve started a collection of antique cameras just to do more fun things with.

I’ve bought a Raspberry Pi camera attachment that takes Infrared pictures which I plan to use. One of those cameras is an antique wind-up video camera which I am desperate to retrofit; I plan to create “scratchy” silent films with it, while even also using a wind-up mechanism!

Of course, being an engineer, I have many improvements to my initial design to make:

1. Replace the ad-hoc wireless with a proper Wireless AP and security key.
2. Use a Raspberry Pi Zero. They’re much smaller, and there is limited space inside the camera’s, particularly once a battery is added.
3. Power is currently supplied using a usb power bank. I’d like to improve on this with a proper batter designed for the Pi with a smaller footprint.
4. Connect it to the wireless, battery powered printer I have so I can take the entire thing to a Comic Con and be a proper nerd.
5. Use a bluetooth shutter release instead of a physical one. Again, a smaller footprint, fewer moving parts, and won’t necessarily need to use the GPIO pins.

Once I get this down to a science (and I will) I just may very well begin to sell them.

It takes a pretty good picture too! Here is a selfie taken with it, along with a group picture of a recent Halloween party.

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