The Game Boy Camera arrived in Western markets in June 1998, and despite its limitations, it holds a privileged place among fans. In an era of high definition and megapixels as plentiful as candy, many enthusiasts return to its spectacular 14 kilopixels of resolution to capture all kinds of objects. With that in mind we come to the HackMakeMod channel, where they explain how to create different 3D-printed adapters to use the Game Boy Camera for astro and macro photography.
In July 2017, Alexander Pietrow managed to connect his Game Boy Advance SP to a telescope and take a photograph of Jupiter with three of its moons. Why? Because it's a great idea, that's why. The Game Boy Camera has a 128×128 pixel sensor, but the final images are 128×112 pixels, with only four colors (white, black, and two shades of gray). Even so, Alexander's results were excellent, and the question is: How can we expand this?
How to install lenses on the Game Boy Camera to photograph the Moon
With lenses and 3D printing! The latest hack from the HackMakeMod channel presents 26 minutes of information about the physical characteristics of the Game Boy Camera, a good dose of math to capture the Moon correctly, a bit of maintenance (battery and capacitor replacement, because they are more than two decades old), and most importantly: the design of the adapters. Besides making the most of the mounting points for the sensor PCB, the whole process is reversible.
After capturing the Moon at night (this reduced the camera's frame rate to a minimum), the next step was photographing insects, including a hornet that looks threatening even dead, and with the help of cold weather, the session continued with excellent images of snowflakes. The last phase of the project is extracting the images from the camera. While there are devices that simplify image transfer, the DIY route is much cheaper, with an Arduino configured to emulate the Game Boy printer.
HackMakeMod on YouTube: Click here
