Photo credit: Two Bit Arcade via Peta Pixel
Two Bit Arcade’s Martin Fitzpatrick, a self-taught programmer, has built the world’s first Etch A Sketch digital camera, and it’s called the “Etch A Snap”. This pocket-sized device captures digital photos and then uses a Raspberry Pi Zero computer board to draw them onto the actual Etch A Sketch “screen”. The Raspberry Pi uses Pillow and OpenCV to process the photo down to a 240×144 pixel 1-bit black-and-white line before turning them into plotter commands, which are then executed by physically moving the Etch A Sketch wheels with two 5V stepper motors built into a custom 3D-printed frame. Read more for a video and additional information.
“If you’re used to ‘chimping’ your photos, you’ll need a great deal of patience to do so with the Etch-A-Snap: it takes up to an hour for the photo to be processed and then sketched onto the rear screen (depending on the complexity of the photo). And when you’re ready to shoot a new photo, you simply ‘delete’ the previous one by pointing the camera’s screen down and giving it a good shake,” reports Peta Pixel.
