We’ve seen a number of photographers who have taken to the Pi as a way to bring down the cost of the sort of kit that was, pre-Pi, outside the budgets of mere mortals. Case in point: gigapixel photography. A gigapixel image is made up of (at least) a billion pixels, which means you’ve now got access to the sort of fine and vivid detail on your monitor that we mere humans with our shonky eyeballs could only dream of until recently.
At the moment, a camera that can take a gigapixel image all in one shot is the sort of fantasy hardware that the military is pouring millions into. But if you’re not in charge of a defence silo, you can still take your own gigapixel images by stitching together many megapixel-sized images from an SLR camera on a motorised mount into a giant, seamless mosaic with very fine detail. You’ll need something approaching a defence budget if you’re going to do this yourself without building your own hardware, though; I spent a few seconds googling and found that off-the-shelf motorised rigs for your camera can cost nearly $1000.
Tim and Jack Stocker thought this was daft, so they built their own out of MDF, some Lego turntables, and a Pi with a cheap stepper motor attached.
Read more at raspberrypi.org and check out the GigaPi blogspot here!
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro”? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.
We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!