Re:Guide to Pinhole Photography (2013)
by herodotus on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @12:19PM
(#17188993)
I was think more about buying a sensor and an arduino....
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When I looked, most parts-house available sensors are small and even a 1" format sensors are pretty dear. MFT, APS-C, etc. were a multiple of a complete entry level interchangeable lens camera. For a pinhole camera with a small sensor, it's going to be hard to frame a specific subject because the sensor's field of view is tiny. Even a wire viewfinder will probably struggle with framing due to parallax. Basically the low cost sensor for pinhole photography is photo-chemical film.
A hacky alternative for a might be modifying a flatbed scanner. Just step the photo array slowly enough that there's reasonable exposure at each point. The good part is that a flatbed scanner is a stupid big sensor and there is some literature for hacking them. But for a pinhole, I'd expect the exposures to be rather long even for pinhole photography.
This post [1] describes how to use the electronics in a webcam. But you're essentially just replacing the webcam's lens with a pinhole.
What you're basically asking is how to build a webcam from components. Which I assume is possible but non-trivial.
[1] https://shutterhub.org.uk/how-to-build-a-digital-pinhole-cam...