pisight's Introduction

PiSight

I put a Raspberry Pi inside an Apple iSight. You can read more about the PiSight on Medium.

Hardware

Part	Info	Price (2020)
Apple iSight	Available new and used on eBay	$15 to 150
Raspberry Pi Zero	The W version adds Wifi, which makes working with it easier and opens it up to more applications	$5 or $10
Raspberry Pi Camera V2	Supports 1080p@30 or 720p@60, at a 62° horizontal field of view	$29.95
M2.6 screws	4 of M2.6 x 0.45 mm Thread, 6 mm long	$9.26 for 25
M2 screws	2 of M2 x 0.4 mm Thread, 4 mm long	$13.28 for 100
O-ring	Covers the gap around the lens	$6.16 for 50
Raspberry Pi Zero camera cable	A few options, but the 15 cm long narrow ones seem to work best	$3.49
Micro-USB cable	Many options, just need to fit the iSight adapter	$8.99
3D-printed frame	Use `PiSight.stl` or `PiSight.step`, cost varies significantly depending on material quality	$50 to $200

Software

The PiSight camera implements the UVC standard via the Gadget API, which turns the Raspberry Pi and camera into a plug-and-play USB webcam. I used the instructions in David Hunt's blog post, with a few modifications in my own fork of uvc-gadget.

I consolidated these steps into a setup script, so you should be able to simply run sudo setup.sh after installing Raspberry Pi OS and enabling the camera and serial interfaces.

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