Paragon Project: The Ultimate Pi Camera

Ever tried to take a photo of the moon? You invariably end up with a tiny white dot, right? Well, this project finally makes it possible to take high-quality photos of the moon.

It’s creator – doomMonkey266 over on reddit – calls it “The ZoomPi”, but we here at PiCockpit have taken to calling it The Ultimate Pi Camera.

If you’re looking to capture high-resolution photos (or video) and have them stream in real-time, then this is absolutely the Pi camera that you need!

Hardware

The hardware, as you can see in the photograph above, is also wonderfully straightforward.

You’ll need a lens (the lens in the photograph is a Tamron 80-210mm Canon EF lens) and a Raspberry Pi.

Aside from that, doomMonkey266 has decided to 3D print a mount for the lens and hook up the Raspberry Pi to a TP-Link for a strong internet connection.

You can find the files to 3D print the mount here.

Having a TP-Link can offer a number of benefits. For example, with a stronger WiFi signal, you can transfer images directly to the cloud. Alternatively, you could set this up to stream video.

The possibilities are endless!

Software

Speaking of endless, although doomMonkey266 doesn’t mention the software for this specific project, there are tons of options for turning a Raspberry Pi into a camera.

You could check out this page on image and video recording with the Raspberry Pi, for instance. It outlines all sorts of tools to control a camera, like raspicam, Motion, and the RPi Cam Web Interface.

Once you’ve got everything set up, look at what becomes possible:

Conclusion

That’s it – a super accessible, super powerful Raspberry Pi camera. You could easily make this in no time at all!

Again, you can check out the details to make the Ultimate Pi Camera yourself over on the reddit page here.

You can see more Paragon Projects that we’ve featured in this series by clicking here.

After you photograph the moon, what’s next?