Pseudonymous Lithuanian maker “Atominis Sumuštinis” (“Atomic Sandwich”), hereafter simply “Atomic,” has built a “poor man’s Polaroid” — by combining a Raspberry Pi single-board computer and camera sensor with a thermal printer originally designed for receipts.
“This is an instant camera that uses [a] thermal printer to print photos, the same one that prints your receipts at the store,” Atomic explains of the project. “Photos aren’t the same quality as the self-developing film that Polaroid uses, but they do have some, uhh, charm to them, I suppose. [The] title might be a bit misleading though: when I call it ‘poor man’s,’ I mean ‘fun DIY project, possibly made by poor hands,’ and not a cheap camera, since the parts cost me more than the cheapest Polaroid.”
The parts may cost more than an actual Polaroid camera, but the prints are cheap: rather than full-color self-developing film, which can cost upwards of $1 per photo taken, the camera outputs to low-cost thermal paper — with the downside being, of course, a limited resolution and only black and white as the available colors.
Inside the camera’s 3D-printed housing is a compact Raspberry Pi Zero single-board computer, connected to a low-cost camera module. “Some might say this [is] overkill,” Atomic admits, “[but] I say this is what I had on hand.” Elsewhere in the case is a dismantled USB power bank — “somehow a lot cheaper than buying [the] same parts separately,” Atomic explains — and a low-cost thermal printer originally designed for printing receipts from a point-of-sale system.
The Python program, running on a Raspberry Pi Zero, adjusts for different exposure requirements. (📷: Atominis Sumuštinis)
“[The Raspberry] Pi camera is decent,” Atomic says, “but sometimes the picture is too dark, other times there’s too much light. Because of this, in the code […] you can see a bunch of functions which adjust the picture depending on it’s brightness. I’ve figured out when to use which adjustment by trial and error.”
The project is documented in full, including Python source code, on Atomic’s blog.