How to Turn a Vintage Brownie Into a Tumblr GIF Camera

While your grandparents might have been happy collecting antique silverware and hummingbird figurines, geeks these days tend to like collecting vintage mechanical and electronic devices — it speaks to our interests. Early computers, retro video game consoles, and antique typewriters are all geek favorites. Becky Stern likes to collect vintage retro cameras.

One of the cameras in her collection, a Kodak Target Brownie six-20, wasn’t getting much use. The Brownie line of cameras, originally introduced in 1900, were incredibly popular because of their very low cost. Because so many Brownie cameras were sold, it’s pretty easy to find them at antique stores around the country at affordable prices. Unfortunately, actually using one is fairly expensive, due to the costs of the film and getting that film developed.

Becky’s had seen better days, so she decided it would be a good candidate for hacking (something she wasn’t willing to do with her nicer cameras). To bring the vintage Brownie into the modern world, Becky converted it into a digital camera that automatically uploads GIFs to her Tumblr page. To do this, she put a Raspberry Pi along with a Pi Camera into the gutted Brownie, along with complementary components like a battery pack and WiFi dongle.

The hardware setup is pretty straightforward, with the Pi Camera peeking out of the Brownie and a pushbutton for taking GIFs. LEDs are used to indicate the status of the camera. Becky then setup a Python script to handle taking a video, processing it as a GIF, and posting it to her Tumblr account via the Tumblr API. If you want to build your own, any vintage camera with a big enough case should work nicely — just make sure not to hack up a valuable one!