This YouTuber Built His Own Digital Camera Sensor, You Can Too

Not only phone manufacturers or tech companies can make a digital camera sensor, but you can also make one yourself too. At least, that’s what this YouTuber has discovered. However, if you want to do this, you need a certain understanding of electronics, a whole lot of patience and a steady soldering hand. Oh, and remember not to keep high expectations of the performance of your self-made hardware.

It’s not too difficult to understand how a digital image sensor works: a dense grid of photosites captures color and intensity data, which is worth millions of pixels, about the photons that hit them. However, the hardware hacker YouTuber in this story, named Sean Hodgins, was different from camera sensor companies because his sensor with millions of light-detecting pixels wasn’t small enough to be put inside a slim phone.

He made a digital camera sensor with a resolution of 32x32 pixels, which is 12,000 times less detailed than an average sensor used in a smartphone these days. Its performance is even worse than the low-resolution Game Boy Camera.

However, his creation is sill amazing as he had to solder 1,024 ALS-PT19 phototransistors with his own hands to custom a printed circuit board (PCB) that he designed. That’s why we said you would need a whole lot of patience to make this sensor.

Also, the printed circuit board incorporates two 32-bit analog multiplexers with a microcontroller, which is how each phototransistor captures light intensity readings. On a smartphone or a digital camera, this process takes a blink to complete, but Hodgins’  creation about five seconds for taking measurements from each and all the pixels on the sensor, meaning both the hardware and the object being photographed must stay still until the capturing process is done.

Though the whole thing is too low tech compared with what we are using these days, it demonstrates the operation of powerful digital shooters.