PowerCam
By Braden Wang
Intermediate Category (Grades 9-10)
Innovation | Engineering and Computer Science
Whenever I go on vacation with family, school trips, or any other of the sort, I’m always taking pictures. However, as I go on more and more trips I start missing more and more great photo moments or landscapes due to the fact that my camera is off. And no, I can’t just leave it on, because the battery will drain faster than I can replace them, and keeping track of multiple batteries is something I, and many others, are apparently not capable of (I already lost two batteries). Inspired by this problem, I decided to make myself a camera. A camera that can do all that you would expect from a camera yet have a battery life that can last the entire day turned on. Myself not being able to assemble a camera from scratch, I settled on a Raspberry Pi as the driver and the picam 2 that can be attached to the raspberry pi. As for the software itself, I borrowed code from different websites and mushed them together to make myself a working camera software. After all the electrical components were soldered on and the software was coded, I went on to use fusion 360 to design and print a plastic case for my camera. This isn’t as far as this project can go. Due to the versatility of the Raspberry Pi, this project can be expanded on almost indefinitely. Some of the ideas I have are AI face recognition, a better lens (from scratch?), and possibly the ability to upload images to google drive when connected to wifi. Everything said, even though my initial goal was reached, this project is far from finished.
