Le myope

29/04/2016

A short-sighted Raspberry Pi camera.

Even more imprecise than a blurry polaroid picture, or than a filter-abused instagram shot. Using the most advanced algorithms based on machine learning and computer vision, here is ‘Le myope’, a short-sighted camera. The new iteration of the layercam ‘Why are you taking this picture? It’s already on the Internet!’ is a Raspberry Pi based camera, that takes a picture and returns a similar one from Google similar image search. Use it in a popular place and chances are that you will get the same picture taken by someone else. (That happened with the mural during one of the tests) Use it in a remote place and get random roughly similar pictures from all over the internet!

Alice had the original idea and designed the logo, and video was shot by Charly. Find instructions to make your own myope camera below.

Original guitar

Another guitar

Bill of materials:

Camera

• Raspberry Pi (rpi 2)
• a couple of wires
• good ol’ Raspberry Pi camera module
• 10 ohms resistor
• push button
• Belkin N150 micro Wireless USB adapter
• battery to power the Pi (a Duracell Instant USB Charger in my case)
• screen (4.3 Inch LCD TFT Rearview Monitor screen)
• rechargeable 9V battery to power the screen up, because I wasn’t able to hook the screen up on the pi 5v alim

Box

• a bit a MDF
• a laser-cutter (the one at [Carrefour numérique])

Here is the code for the button, to launch the python script

Here is the code to take a picture, upload it, launch the google image scrapper and display the approximate resulting picture:

Here is the basic google image scrapper I did with casperJS:

Camera side

Screen side

Additional steps:

• activate picamera: raspberrypi.pi doc
• install casper js: quaintproject doc
• install feh: simple image viewer