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Create Your Own Bullet Time Camera Rig With Raspberry Pi

Posted by timothy on from the price-elasticity-of-frippery dept.

sfcrazy writes "A team of extremely creative people have created a really inexpensive bullet time set-up using Raspberry Pis — and the whole set-up costs less than a professional DSLR camera. The rig looks more like the LHC at CERN using nearly half a kilometre of network cables, 48 Raspberry Pis fitted with cameras and PiFace Control. The rig worked perfectly — in terms of doing what a bullet time set-up should do. Raspberry Pis achieved the Hollywood's 'frozen time' effect at a much lesser cost."

1 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Re:sort of by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    The "really inexpensive" part was what I thought was humourous. "costs less than a professional DSLR camera". Math is fun!

    So the "best" DSLR right now according to reviews is the CanonEOS-1D X which can be had for ~$5500. Divide that by 48 because that's how many pi complete devices they used and we get $114.58. The Pi that they used was the $35 unit because they needed Ethernet. They also had a $30 camera and a $33 PiFace display on each. We're up to $98... oh wait, they used preloaded SD cards at $13 a pop, and we're up to $111 with no power supply. Fine, lets say that with bulk prices we get PS from the goddamn Loch Ness Monster for three fiddy a piece. Bam, we've hit or target. Or at least we would if we didn't have to factor in networking components, a custom "laser cut" frame, or 0.5km of cable and a days worth of time to crimp ninety six RJ45 plugs.

    The TL:DR point is to stop giving us meaningless indicators of how much some shit costs. Just tell us a number. Did you know that this project supposedly costs less than the average trade in value of a 2005 Honda Accord? ($5775) It costs sufficiently less than giving birth to a child ($8802) It even is less than the cost of eating a donut a day for thirty years? ($5962.50 @ $0.50 ea plus 6% sales tax) and that doesn't even factor in the added costs of type 2 diabetes!

    So just tell us how much it costs. Everything else is just wasting our time. My apologies if you actually read through my entire post.