LadyAda from Adafruit is one of my very favourite people. We have a tradition of spending at least one evening eating Korean barbecue whenever I visit New York. We have told each other many secrets over bowls of fizzy fermented rice beverage, posed for photographs in front of plastic meats, been filmed pointing at electronics for the New York Times, and behaved very badly together in Pinkberry in September. LadyAda is the perfect combination of super-smart hacker, pink hair and business ninja; her cat Mosfet likes to Skype transatlantically with the Raspberry Pi cat, Mooncake (at least I think that their intense ignoring of each other constitutes “liking”); and we are incredibly fortunate that she saw the Pi and instantly understood what we were trying to do back in 2011. Here she is on the cover of the MagPi. (Click the image to visit the MagPi website, where you can download the issue for free.)

Her business, Adafruit, which employs an army of hackers and makers, does wonderful things with the Pi. They’ve been incredibly helpful to us in getting the word about Raspberry Pi and our educational mission out in North America. Adafruit not only stocks the Raspberry Pi and a whole warehouse-full of compatible electronics; the team also creates some amazing Raspberry Pi add-ons, along with projects and tutorials.

This is Adafruit’s latest Pi project, and it blew our minds.

All the parts you’ll need to create your own point-and-shoot camera using the Raspberry Pi, a Raspberry Pi camera board, and a little touch-screen TFT add-on board that Adafruit have made especially for the Pi, are available from Adafruit (they ship worldwide and are super-friendly). You can also find out how to send your photos to another computer over WiFi, or using Dropbox. As the Adafruit team says:

This isn’t likely to replace your digital camera (or even phone-cam) anytime soon…it’s a simplistic learning exercise and not a polished consumer item…but as the code is open source, you or others might customize it into something your regular camera can’t do.

As always, full instructions on making your own are on the learning section of Adafruit’s website, with a parts list, comprehensive setup instructions, and much more.

Adafruit have been especially prolific this week: we’ll have another project from them to show you in a few days. Thanks to LadyAda, PT, and especially to Phillip Burgess, who engineered this camera project.