Laptop engineering pupil and maker Yannick Richter has constructed a working 200-megapixel digital camera and is engaged on extending it to over a gigapixel â by repurposing the charge-coupled machine (CCD) from an previous Epson scanner.
“Whereas there are just a few DIY initiatives changing CCD scanners into cameras,” Richter explains of Venture Gigapixel, “most of them use the unique scanner {hardware} and software program, primarily packaging a scanner into a brand new case and lowering the journey vary with gears. This often works, however comes with some limitations primarily in decision, options, and tricking the unique scanner calibrations. This challenge as an alternative goals to reverse-engineer the utilization and protocol of the CCD present in Epson V30(0), V37(0), [and] V200 4800DPI scanners for direct DIY use.”
“Venture Gigapixel” turns the CCD sensor from an previous scanner right into a high-resolution digital camera â able to capturing photos at 200 megapixels with a goal of 1.6 gigapixels. (đ·: Yannick Richter)
Scanners are designed to seize photos of nonetheless objects at a far increased decision than a digital camera, by slowly scanning them line-by-line â within the case of the sensor utilized in Venture Gigapixel, 12 traces at a time. “The sensor utilized in these scanners appears to be the 12 line (RGB Ă2Ă2 Primary+Sub line) ILX561K CCD [Charge-Coupled Device] with 122,400 complete pixels. Through the use of all traces current a sq. RGB picture of over 1.6 Gigapixels with 16b true coloration could possibly be achievable.”
Whereas Richter’s present prototype, which connects the sensor to a Raspberry Pi 5 single-board pc with high-speed Non-Unstable Reminiscence Specific (NVMe) storage, with the interfacing work offloaded to the programmable enter/output (PIO) blocks of the in-house RP1 peripheral chip after proving the idea with an exterior Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller, does not fairly attain the goal gigapixel-plus, it is already impressively succesful â delivering a 200 megapixel picture measuring 21,700Ă10,000 pixels. “There may be nonetheless slight chromatic aberration,” Richter admits of the outcomes to date, “and [âŠ] each second line is barely darker because the sub-lines appear to have a barely completely different sensitivity.”
The work-in-progress challenge is documented in full on Richter’s Hackaday.io web page.
