Do you ever want to put
your vintage camera lens to use again? Well, you can make this dream come true
because the Raspberry Pi Foundation has released a camera that supports C- and
CS-mount lenses!

Now you must be
wondering how you’d be able to do anything if you lack understanding of the
coding system. Well, here’s the thing: any amateur can do this!

You should know that
the Raspberry Pi is an extremely tiny computer and is efficiently programmable.
Hence, you can use these to program everything from portable
arcades to smart mirrors, and even COVID-19 case counters. You can literally do anything with
these small boxes if you’re well versed with programming.

But don’t feel left out
because I’ll tell you how to build your own camera with a Raspberry Pi 4!

To begin with, you need
to have the following things: A $50 HQ Camera Mod, a 3.5-inch touchscreen, a USB-C portable 10,000mAh
charger, jumper wires, a tiny switch button switch, two vintage C-mount lenses, body of a Ninoka NK-700 35mm camera, and a Raspberry
Pi 4 computer!

Here’s the plan: you
plug in your HQ camera board to your Raspberry Pi computer and then easily program the
system in order to take pictures with a button. Next, you place all of these components
into the body of a toy camera. Remember that the plan is simple but only in
theory – practically it’s not as simple as it may seem.

So, you can take the
official Raspberry Pi Camera guide which is free online and full of codes for
programming various functions like stop-motion photography etc. You need to
keep at it because many times you will insert codes and they will return error
messages, so for a novice, it’s truly a matter of luck. However, you can get yourself an easy to learn CanaKit Raspberry Pi 4 4GB Starter Kit or get the help of the Vilros Raspberry Pi 4 Basic Starter Kit to be successful in your first go. 

Thus, make sure you
read the HQ Camera’s user manual at least 50 times! Once you are able to
program the camera to take pictures using that tiny button, you can begin
collecting the hardware to venture into the world to take photographs. You may
need to add an additional battery pack to power the system along with a
3.5-inch touchscreen to preview and operate the software of the camera.

But be prepared as
there’s a 99% chance that things might not go as planned. Since there
are countless possibilities with tiny computers, you can try to follow the things
that people come up with on Reddit rather than experimenting on your own.