Underwater Raspberry Pi Camera Setup

When you want to take underwater photos, you could buy something off-the-shelf like a GoPro or similar, but what fun would that be? As seen here, hacker Fred Fourie instead decided to make his own underwater camera rig with a section of PVC pipe and a Raspberry Pi.

His experimentation started out by attempting to modify several digital cameras for automatic use, but found this to be unreliable because of different issues, like charged flash capacitors and complicated release buttons. After several attempts, Fourie decided to go a different direction, and mounted a Raspberry Pi, along with the Pi camera inside of a waterproof PVC pipe housing. He went through several iterations of this before settling on a final design, which is held to the sea bottom with diving weights.

When tested, Fourie was able to get some really neat pictures through the device’s Perspex window. While he was impressed with the camera’s ability to handle the dim lighting under the water, he found his time lapse settings of 30 seconds between shots in first water test was insufficient. What he got looks interesting, but it did miss an octopus brawl, certainly the highlight of any shallow water marine life observation mission!