Sherwin Salemi

Digital Camera

In 10th grade, I built this digital camera. My class was doing a project on building film cameras, but knowing my deep interest in mechatronics, my teacher let me make a digital one instead. I designed a custom PCB in KiCad consisting of a 10x10 multiplexed array of near infrared phototransistors. I used an STM-32 Blue Pill to poll the sensor into a buffer which gets sent to my laptop over USB for viewing in a Javascript canvas. The optics are from a magnifying glass. The camera has a variable focal plane, and a theoretical refresh rate of at least 10,000 fps! However, without recording to an internal buffer, the real world performance is much lower than that due to USB bandwidth limitations.

This project was special because it was the first time others (my classmates) saw me bring something from idea to completion, and I was told that getting to play with the finished result was super inspiring. A class of middle school students came over to see our project, and they loved it. A few stayed to ask follow up questions and express their interest in STEM, which I hope I was able to contribute to.