On big projects like this it is really important to forward plan how your going to achieve some of the major assessable components. At the end of the project I need to have a set of models which fully represent my design intentions. The main goals of this project are focused on user interaction; something which is heavily product design orientated. The electronics inside the camera are of much lower priority. Without an electronic engineer, lots of time and a fairly substantial budget, there is no way to develop my own electronics for the inside of the camera. Therefore, to get a working model, I will need to transplant the workings of another off the shelf camera inside my model.
There are two options readily available to me. The first, is to use a programmable board such as an Arduino or RasberryPi (I own one already and used it as the sensor during the composition accuracy testing at the initial ideas stage) along with an image sensor. While this was potentially feasible, the off the shelf camera sensor modules are tiny... they are the same as the ones built into non proprietary camera phones. These are low budget, low quality parts, and there simply aren't any bigger ones available without going to a semiconductor reseller and buying sensors which need complex programming.
The second option is to go and grab myself a small compact camera (which feature slightly bigger sensors) and rip its guts out to use in my model. The problem with this is almost all manufacturers don't like the idea of you doing this, and therefore make it really hard for you. Safety limit swiches on things like the battery door, the pop out flash, the lens housing, all mean that if you take the wrong body part off of the camera, it just stops working. There is one company however, Vivitar, which sell very very low budget cheap cameras. They are terrible. However, the lack of development inside these cameras means they have no safeties, and as seen above the parts can easily be taken out fully working.
To fit into my camera body, the circuit would have to be very small. The main issue with my design is that it features rounded corners. All Vivitar cameras a rectangular and have circuitry which fill this shape. Also, due to the sensor being fixed to the board, I need a camera with the sensor far over to the right hand side as you look at it, so it will align with the centre of where the "real lens" should be. After searching for hours and hours, dead sure I'd find what I need, I concluded that there just wasn't a camera with a circuit board small enough to fit in.
Without wanting to resort to cheap spy cams with tiny phone sensors available cheap off of eBay, my search then shifted to "smallest compact cameras". This brought me to the Nikon Coolpix S01 and its slightly newer brother the S02. They are touted to be some of the smallest compact cameras available while still having high quality sensors. Looking on the tech specs on the Nikon website I could see the dimensions were tiny, 77 by 51.2 by 17.2 mm.
As you can see above, the camera looks like it could be a good solution with the lens on the right hand side positioned along the centre line, while also having a very small footprint. As mentioned before, the problem with using good cameras from good manufacturers such as Nikon is that the camera will most likely be full of safety switches. Removing the body therefore would be very difficult. Given the size of the camera though, I imagine the inside is fully packed out and there wouldn't be much space to gain without the body anyway, just a couple of mm from the shell thickness. Using the measurements I drew up a 2D cad file with the dimensions of my camera and the dimensions of the Nikon:
To make this clearer to understand, here is the diagram superimposed on an accurately scaled scan of my latest form model:
As you can see, the camera almost fits into the body. The very tips of the rounded corners of the Nikon scrape the outer profile, leaving no room for wall thickness's. Given how close the fit is however, and the fact that if those corners could be made to fit, I could actually fit the entire camera whole inside my camera body without any need for modification, I bumped the diameter of the design an extra 5mm to give a 2.5mm potential wall thickness. This increases the size of the camera slightly, but is way worth it to have a working system and more importantly to me, a full camera system inside with a decent sensor.
The best news though? While the S02 is current and still goes for a high retail price, the older generation 10Mpx S01 is being sold brand new for £50 by businesses operating on eBay! Bargain!
