An Ultra-Low-Cost Large-Format Wireless IoT Camera

This paper documents the design, construction, and experimental evaluation of an ultra-low-cost large-format digital camera. Used lenses that cover formats up to 4x5 can be surprisingly inexpensive, but large-format image sensors are not. By combining 3D printing with cheap components developed for use in IoT (Internet of Things) devices, especially the sub-$10 ESP32-CAM, a digital scanning large-format camera capable of over 2GP resolution can be constructed at very low cost. Despite the large image area, Lafodis160 is literally a wireless IoT device, fully remote controllable via Bluetooth and WiFi. This camera was originally intended to serve as a testbed for novel ways to improve capture quality for scenes that are not completely static during the scan interval, and a brief overview is given of methods employing unusual scan orderings that will be evaluated using it.