In late 2020 I built a DSLR from a Raspberry Pi, a sensor board, and a lens mount, and I want to be honest about the results: it took worse pictures than the phone already in my pocket. Slower to focus, worse in low light, heavier, uglier. By every measure that matters to a photograph, a failure.
It’s one of the most useful things I’ve ever built.
The internet is full of Raspberry Pi cameras. I wasn’t first, I wasn’t best, and the build wasn’t even hard by maker standards — the Pi camera module does the genuinely difficult part, and my contribution was everything around it: the enclosure, the controls, the software, an interchangeable lens mount, and the hundred small decisions between “parts on a desk” and “object you can hold.”
What I wanted was to stop treating a camera as a sealed appliance. You can read about exposure all day, but writing the code that turns a sensor readout and a shutter time into a stored image installs the knowledge somewhere deeper. After the build, every camera I picked up felt legible. Menus became a UI over ideas I’d implemented badly myself.
The same winter logic produced a stranger sibling: a four-lens stereoscopic rig made from security cameras, synchronized in software to fire together, producing those wiggling 3D GIFs — wobblegrams. Built from what was in the house, because in 2020 that was the supply chain. It’s held together with more hot glue than I’ll admit to in person. It also made images no phone could, which the DSLR never managed, and there’s probably a lesson in the fact that the joke camera beat the serious one.
Years later I ended up writing a camera app for the Light Phone III, and the fingerprints of that Pi build are all over it. The conviction that a camera should be operable by feel. The wheel as a physical control instead of a screen slider. The gallery as part of the camera instead of a separate app — a decision I’d first made in 2020 for the unromantic reason that I didn’t want to write two programs.
I couldn’t have told you at the time what the build was for. It cost a few months of evenings and produced a bad camera. But some projects are tuition. You don’t get the artifact; you get to be the person who made it, and that person turns out to know things.