Polaroid camera can eject animated gif

A hobbyist has created a camera based on the Raspberry Pi with the design of a Polaroid model that does not eject photos, but an LCD cartridge. The cartridge shows a recorded fragment as a short animated gif.

The man, Abhishek Singh or shekit for short, calls his design Instagif NextStep. He was inspired by the look of the Polaroid OneStep, or Polaroid Land Camera 1000, a striking mid-seventies camera with its signature rainbow print. Instead of photos, the Instagif had to send moving images, that was the idea of ​​shekit.

He based the camera on a Raspberry Pi 3 with Raspberry Pi Cam V2 and an 8GB SD card. At the push of a button, the camera records a three-second gif, which the system then serves over an ad hoc network for the cartridge to download.

That cartridge contains a Raspberry Pi Zero and a 2.8″ LCD with a 400mAh battery. As soon as the cartridge is removed from the camera, a fade-in starts to make the gif visible, just like it does with the Polaroid. it takes for the photo to be visible.

The hardest part was the ejection mechanism, shekit writes. He eventually opted for a system with wheels. He made the housing with 3D printers: the Projet 7000 SLA and the Ultimaker 2+. When recording a new gif, the old one is overwritten.