Making your own digital camera sensor is n’t as complicated as you ’d mean , asYouTube hardware hackerSean Hodginsdiscovered . But you ’ll need a solid understanding of electronics , an immense amount of patience , asteady soldering hand , and very small prospect of how your home brew hardware will perform .

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The general idea of how a digital image sensor act upon is relatively simple : a dull power grid of light - observe photosites captures gazillion of pixels deserving of intensity and color data about the photon hitting them . But making a sensor with millions of these lightsome - detecting pixels that ’s small enough to fit inside a slim smartphone is what discriminate Hodgins ’ creation from what companies like Sony are hoi polloi - producing in cutting - edge factories .

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With a solution of just 32×32 pixels , Hodgin ’s digital camera sensor is close to 12,000 times less detailed than the sensor you ’ll happen in the average smartphone camera , and it even performs bad than thefamously grim - res Game Boy Cameraaccessory . But even so , it ’s still a remarkable accomplishment because in rescript to create this sensing element Hodgins had to hand solder 1,024 ALS - PT19 phototransistors to a usage PCB board he ’d design . That ’s a exam of patience far beyond what most of us could ever digest .

The custom PCB circuit card also incorporate a pair of32 - bit parallel multiplexersand a microcontroller , which is how lightheaded intensity Reading are captured by each phototransistor , one by one . This process happens almost instantly on a digital photographic camera or smartphone sport a herculean central processing unit , but Hodgin ’s creation takes about five seconds to take measurements from every pixel on the sensor , which means both the computer hardware and the subject being photograph ca n’t move while an look-alike is being captured . It ’s about as low - tech as a digital camera can get , but this is how the sinewy digital shooter we all apply now protrude life — except Hodgin does n’t have a multi - million clam R&D lab full of electronics and machinery at his electric pig . He did it the hard manner .

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Argentina’s President Javier Milei (left) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., holding a chainsaw in a photo posted to Kennedy’s X account on May 27. 2025.

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