In 2015 AMT was hosting a Holiday party and cool things that involved the guests where needed, thus Edgy-Cam was born.

Edgy-Cam is a Raspberry Pi with a camera module and connected to a thermal receipt printer. Using the Canny Edge Detection algorithm, photos are taken with the camera, processed and turned into hand drawnish monochrome image that is printed out on the thermal printer. Like other instant cameras, but with some serious image processing going on. Every processed image is a monochrome 512×384 and given a unique filename and saved on the Raspberry Pi. Images can be retrieved later if people are interested.

The case is made out of 1/4″ baltic birch plywood and was CNC cut at AMT. The black inlay is tolex, a vinyl like material and this is the same pattern as found on Marshall guitar amplifiers. After cutting and assembly, the case had the edges rounded over on the AMT router table. All case assembly, sanding and gluing was done in the AMT woodshop.

The display is a standard 4.3″ composite LCD monitor, mostly used for watching the rear view camera in a car.

The thermal printer is a standard 58mm thermal receipt printer with 5V TTL UART interface. It communicates with the raspberry pi (3.3V) via a serial connection that is run though a level shifter to make the 5V to 3.3V and back play well with each other.

All this is powered by a 8000mAh 11.1V lithium ion battery. The battery has enough juice to run for hours and take and print over a hundred photos.

Fun fact: The Canny Edge Detection Algorithm is named after John F Canny who is a UC Berkeley computer science professor.

The Edgy-Cam software is a python script that is run on bootup, and uses the SimpleCV library to supply the Canny Edge algorithm.