2bit Astrophotography with the Game Boy Camera

http://home.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~pietrow/astrogb.html

by cremno • 9 years ago

222 55 9 years ago

home.strw.leidenuniv.nl

jacquesm4• 9 years ago

That's worthy of the term 'hack'. Very neat :)

There should be some silly way of doing this with just a single photo diode and a speaker to provide one axis of motion and to let the Earth's rotation provide the other axis.

anfractuosity7• 9 years ago

Heh that'd be very cool! Do it!

rocky11383• 9 years ago

Can you explain what you mean?

jacquesm4• 9 years ago

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 captured by the diode taking into account the driving voltage of the speaker and the time that has passed.

orbital-decay3• 9 years ago

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.

anfractuosity7• 9 years ago

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?

Frenchgeek• 9 years ago

http://www.gperco.com/2014/10/single-pixel-camera.html

djhworld• 9 years ago

Really fun read, thanks

Next step, find the Gameboy Printer and print out your shots!

tbabb• 9 years ago

Very cool.

I'd be very curious to see what happens if you do exposure stacking-- in principle, you could get a lot more bit depth!

throwaway1572• 9 years ago

Came here to say exactly this! In addition, you could stack and them once you have something that's at least 8 bits per pixel use Photoshop to clean things up.

I guess instead of making an HDR image from SDR images you'd be making an SDR image from LDR images. :-)

Jyaif• 9 years ago

I doubt the CMOS is only 2 bits, otherwise we wouldn't have such nice dithering pattern. Somewhere in RAM there's probably at one point a representation of the image with at least 3 bits per pixel.

Luc• 9 years ago

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...

objclxt• 9 years ago

Yep, here's the technical data sheet for the chip:

https://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece4760/FinalPro...

pepijndevos• 9 years ago

It is the Game Boy screen that has only two bits.

averagewall• 9 years ago

It's an analog output. You can very easily add an ADC to get higher bits per pixel and bypass the whole digital Gameboy interface. I did this once when the game boy camera was about the cheapest digital camera available. I even converted it to color by taking successive photos with colored filters and combining them in software.

Curiously, the camera has hardware edge detection which might have helped with very early machine vision.

phpnode• 9 years ago

Is this the most Hacker News title of the year so far?

app4soft3• 9 years ago

CASIO 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

app4soft3• 9 years ago

https://youtube.com/watch?v=czXbhW_hT3A

ljf2• 9 years ago

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!

app4soft3• 9 years ago

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!

serf• 9 years ago

digital camera watch from the early 2000's : 6 months of battery life on a CR2032 coin battery.

Current day smart watch (without a camera in most cases) : 24 hours to 1 week battery life using a lithium ion battery.

zokier• 9 years ago

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.

kregasaurusrex• 9 years ago

Neat 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.

makmanalp• 9 years ago

In 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?

Extigy• 9 years ago

There's an iOS app called Retrospecs that has some cool lo-fi filters.

roywiggins• 9 years ago

8Bit Photo Lab on Android is pretty good.

mcpherrinm• 9 years ago

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...

joshvm2• 9 years ago

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.

anfractuosity7• 9 years ago

You can also interestingly get the raw sensor data from the Pi camera too, as in before the demosaicing is applied.

I wonder, this may be silly, but could you not potentially get a slightly higher resolution image, if you just created a pixel for every sensel. Than if you were to apply the demosaicing algorithm then convert to grayscale.

joshu• 9 years ago

Use a normal camera and post-process. Use Imagemagick[1]

Like so: http://imgur.com/a/YpHzZ

http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/quantize/

faragon• 9 years ago

Super-resolution [1] using the Game Boy Camera: any taker?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-resolution_imaging

owobeid• 9 years ago

If you guys don't have the original Game Boy Camera and would like to try, I wrote an iPhone app a while ago to get a similar effect. Sorry for the shameless plug :P

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pixl8r/id981531620

2bit Astrophotography with the Game Boy Camera

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