Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W turns an old heirloom into a digital camera

A new Raspberry project by the user Airpocket has transformed an old Bell & Howell 8mm camera made in the 1950s into a video camera capable of shooting video digitally. As you can see from the profile, the Airpocket user is an electronics enthusiast with several projects behind him that include Arduino and open source software, the last of which is the one we are talking about in this article.

Airpocket he described in detail the steps of his project on the dedicated page. The user made use of a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, the most powerful model of the Zero series that comes very close to the performance of Raspberry Pi 3B. The old Bell & Howell movie camera has a shutter that allows it to be adjusted to shoot from a minimum of 16 fps to a maximum of 64 fps, without any elements that can be controlled automatically.



The digital movie camera with Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W by Airpocket
You can see the results of the work in the posted videos on the dedicated page, one of which shows a short 5 second shot. Airpocket also specified that the project is still in the works, with updates that will be posted in the future as soon as they are complete. All the steps are illustrated and can be viewed on the Elchika page.

Staying on the subject, an enthusiast managed to find a way to use an external video card with Raspberry Pi 4. You can learn more about the news in our article.