The SATURNIX Is a Slick, Raspberry Pi-Powered Pocket Camera with Built-In Film Simulation
Fancy a bit of Kodak Gold, or Fujifilm 400? Are you more of a Tri-X 400? This clever camera offers all these and more, in-body.
Pseudonymous maker "Yutani" has built a slick-looking digital camera powered by a Raspberry Pi — and offering the unusual twist of in-body film simulation, delivering the ability to mimic the appearance of a range of popular film types from Kodak and Fujifilm.
"SATURNIX is a DIY digital camera built on Raspberry Pi Zero 2W with a 16MP autofocus sensor, 2" LCD viewfinder, and built-in film simulation engine," Yutani explains of the project. "It shoots RAW+JPG and processes photos on-device with cinematic color profiles — from Kodak Gold to a custom anime-inspired preset. No apps. No cloud. Just a camera."
Building a digital camera from a Raspberry Pi is a tried-and-tested approach: even the compact Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, the smallest model in the family before you have to move to building a carrier for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module computer-on-module range, includes a MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI), making it easy to interface with either Raspberry Pi's in-house camera sensors or any one of the growing number of third-party camera modules on the market.
In the case of the SATURNIX, it's a third-party sensor: The Arducam IMX519, a 16-megapixel Sony sensor with hardware autofocus. This connects to the MIPI CSI port on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, while the SPI bus on the single-board computer's general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header is used to drive a 2" IPS LCD display hosting a live preview, playback, and the camera's user interface, linked to five mechanical switches. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2W's own microSD card slot serves as storage, there's a piezoelectric buzzer for audible feedback, and the choice of an external USB Type-C battery pack or a PiSugar 2 internal battery.
What makes the camera stand out, though, isn't the hardware, but the software: in addition to capturing images as they appear to the sensor, it's able to process them in a variety of ways — including simulating the appearance of photos captured on Kodak Gold 400, Kodak Ektar 100, Kodak Tri-X 400, and Fujifilm 400 35mm films. A "VHS" option renders a "lo-fi tape look," Yutani explains, "[with] scanlines, chromatic aberration, [and] noise," while the default "SATURNIX" filter offers "golden light, anime-style rendering, indigo shadows, [and] bloom." All this processing happens in-body, running on the Raspberry Pi itself — though there's also a built-in Wi-Fi hotspot for transferring photos from the camera to your phone or PC.
The bill of materials, source code, and STL files for printing the camera's case are all available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license and the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license respectively.