Raspberry Pi cameras are up for grabs

MILLION SELLING COMPUTER CHARITY the Raspberry Pi Foundation needs your help testing its upcoming camera module.

The foundation wants some people to test the Raspberry Pi camera module, which is due for release sometime in April, so if you think you can help it's time to put on your thinking cap.

"We've now got several pre-production cameras in the office that we're testing and tweaking and tuning so the software will be absolutely tickety-boo when you come to buy one," said a blog post from the foundation's Liz Upton.

"We're giving these cameras away [because] we want you to help us to do extra-hard testing. We want the people we send these boards to to do something computationally difficult and imaginative with them, so that the cameras are pushed hard in the sort of bonkers scheme that we've seen so many of you come up with here before with your Pis."

There are ten cameras available and they will go to envelope pushing Raspberry Pi users with the most inspired ideas for using them.

We are going with a stop motion picture grab app that captures growing grass. We do not expect to win.

Boundary and envelope pushers will win, and those are the kind of people that have had the most fun and success with the Raspberry Pi so far.

Upton is in no doubt about the quality of the entries they are likely to get. The challenge, most likely, will be in choosing the ten winning candidates.

"The community here always seems to come up with applications for the stuff we do that we wouldn't have thought of in a million years; we thought we should take advantage of that," she said.

"We want you to try to get the camera doing something imaginative. Think about playing around with facial recognition; or hooking two of them up together and modging the images together to create some 3D output; or getting the camera to recognise when something enters the frame that shouldn't be there and doing something to the image as a result."

You have to apply to take part, but it does not sound too rigorous. Start by owning a Raspberry Pi is our advice, and then think of an idea.

These in place, you must then send an email to iwantacamera@raspberrypi.org, explaining your plans. It sounds like thoroughness and experience will pay off here, so if you have samples, code, camera software for example, it will not hurt to include some of that.

Presuming that you have a Raspberry Pi, an email address, an idea, a plan, and some examples, the only thing standing in your way is time. The competition ends on 12 March. µ