The images are remarkably good, considerning the general quality of GB camera images. I suppose this demonstrates that if you stuff enough glass in front of a camera, you can get half-decent images even from the worst of sensors.
2bit Astrophotography with the Game Boy Camera
21–30 of 56 posts
Re: 2bit Astrophotography with the Game Boy Camera
#22Neat stuff! I wouldn't have thought that old of a digital sensor would have the sensitivity to see distant dim objects like this. And being able see the same thing in Stellarium by matching up the coordinate view with the actual photo is also cool.
Re: 2bit Astrophotography with the Game Boy Camera
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can do this even without any motion and possibly even with no focusing optics, just with a single sensor, diffraction grating and a lot of math. This is called single-pixel imaging and is an ongoing research topic in computational imaging.
Could you explain in laymans terms how that would work? If you're only obtaining a single value for a single pixel and there's no movement, how does the pixel value change even if there's a grating in front? Or do you mean the grating can still move?
The pattern still needs to be different at each sampling, yes. Moving the grating is one way to do it, or it can be done with a micromirror array, for example.
Re: 2bit Astrophotography with the Game Boy Camera
#24CASIO WQV-1 is would be much better choice for 2-bit astrophotography.[1] [0] ftp://ftp.casio.co.jp/pub/watch/wc/WQVLink_Manual_K.pdf [1] http://www.3wheelers.com/elvis/body_wqv-1.html
Man I loved that watch - I still have it in my watch box somewhere, but it miss behaves now. I regret not buying the black plastic versions for spares when they were about £12 each. Ho hum!
In 2007 my friend got working WQV-1. I tried it and for me it was something like "007" artifact. Think, if I could buy one sometime - I will buy it immediatly!
Re: 2bit Astrophotography with the Game Boy Camera
#25In case anyone here knows - where can one buy an "old-school" low-res / monochrome / dithered camera module that produces images this one, for easy use with a raspberry pi or arduino or something? All I get is weird electronics company websites with "request more info" buttons - nothing that gives me pricing and a "buy" button.
Or alternatively, what's a way to transform high-res images to look like that?
Re: 2bit Astrophotography with the Game Boy Camera
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain what you mean?
To make an image you need two axis, one horizontal, one vertical. Because the earth is already moving if you have a single photodiode looking at the stars you will scan a line if you wait a while. By adding a second axis of motion such as a speaker which you modulate with a saw-tooth curve you can add a second axis. If you then scan over time you can re-constitute the image by plotting the dots with the intensity cap…
Now you're thinking with superresolution!
Re: 2bit Astrophotography with the Game Boy Camera
#27In case anyone here knows - where can one buy an "old-school" low-res / monochrome / dithered camera module that produces images this one, for easy use with a raspberry pi or arduino or something? All I get is weird electronics company websites with "request more info" buttons - nothing that gives me pricing and a "buy" button. Or alternatively, what's a way to transform high-res images to look like that?
There's an iOS app called Retrospecs that has some cool lo-fi filters.
Re: 2bit Astrophotography with the Game Boy Camera
#28In case anyone here knows - where can one buy an "old-school" low-res / monochrome / dithered camera module that produces images this one, for easy use with a raspberry pi or arduino or something? All I get is weird electronics company websites with "request more info" buttons - nothing that gives me pricing and a "buy" button. Or alternatively, what's a way to transform high-res images to look like that?
Dithering is something done in software; not in the camera (well, camera firmware could do it for you). I'd just get a modern camera and apply filters to get the aesthetic you want. You can take a look at the output of several dithering algorithms on the Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither#Algorithms
Floyd-Steinberg is a reasonable first choice if you want to implement one. There's pseudocode on its Wikipedia page too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd%E2%80%93Steinberg_dither...
Re: 2bit Astrophotography with the Game Boy Camera
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
The camera outputs analog values. I don't know for sure but I bet the dithering is applied right after the analog pixel is converted to digital...
Yep, here's the technical data sheet for the chip: https://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece4760/FinalPro...
"Artificial Retina LSI"... beautiful. :D
Re: 2bit Astrophotography with the Game Boy Camera
#30In case anyone here knows - where can one buy an "old-school" low-res / monochrome / dithered camera module that produces images this one, for easy use with a raspberry pi or arduino or something? All I get is weird electronics company websites with "request more info" buttons - nothing that gives me pricing and a "buy" button. Or alternatively, what's a way to transform high-res images to look like that?
Bin the image from a raspberry pi camera by a factor of.. 8 or so (maybe 16 if you need smaller)? Load the image as grayscale and divide the counts by 64 to get 2-bit values.
Kinda difficult to buy crappy low resolution detectors these days because nobody makes them and you'd need to build the readout electronics yourself. You might as well just use a decent detector and make it look bad.