Introduction

Richard Saville, also known as the Average Man, is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to fund the ProtoCam. The ProtoCam is a prototyping board onto which you can attach your Raspberry Pi camera module and then build whatever circuit you want around it. I spent a morning and an afternoon with a sample board Richard sent me and I have to say I’m really impressed.

You can see what comes in the package above (not the dead fly – that’s extra!). You get the prototyping circuit board, an extended 26-way GPIO header, 4 short plastic screws/nuts (for attaching the camera to the underside of the board) and 1 long plastic screw/nut (which acts as a stand-off or support for the board). The Kickstarter package also comes with a short ribbon cable for your camera. You’ll see from my pictures later that I only had an extra-long ribbon cable – the one Richard is supplying is much shorter and more appropriate and will fold under very conveniently.

Quality and layout

It’s a very good quality board and the black-and-gold styling is very nice to look at. Richard has specified nickel-gold plating on the pads which provides a very good soldering surface. It’s double-sided, so you can solder on top or on the bottom. As you can see, all the GPIO pins are broken out and labelled and the prototyping area is split up into 3-hole and 2-hole strips. There are four 5-hole strips in the middle at the top, primarily to be used for providing more power/ground rails.

Using the board

I first of all soldered on the extended header. I wanted to use it on a B+ (it’s the Pi I had available) but Richard wasn’t too sure it could be used on a B+ because of the USB ports. So, I used a technique demonstrated by Alex Eames of RasPi.TV where you don’t push the header all the way through, thus raising the circuit board slightly away from the ports.

Here’s the board satisfactorily sitting on the B+:

And here’s the board sitting on a model A (although it will sit just as well on a B):

Using it in a project

I wanted to do more than just put the ProtoCam onto the Pi – I wanted to build a circuit and prove that it works as intended. My aim was to build a camera which uses a button to trigger the taking of a photo and uses LEDs as a ‘built in flash’. This is obviously just a proof of concept (especially as I had no white LEDs!), and a bit of fun! So here is my effort:

It’s not the prettiest job you’ll ever see, but it does work! I soldered everything together and wrote the code. You can see the code here on GitHub. If I had to do the project again, I would probably work out some way of soldering everything onto the underside to make it tidier.

Conclusion

I have to say, for projects where you want to integrate the camera, the ProtoCam works brilliantly – the amount of real-estate you have for prototyping is great and the finish is first-rate.

The ProtoCam costs £9. Considering the real-estate available, the quality of the board and the bits-and-pieces you get with it, this is very good value. Although my project is pretty low-scale, I hope you can see the possibilities. Richard’s posted some more uses of the board on the Kickstarter page if you’d like to see how else it can be used.

If you’ve got any questions about the board, feel free to post them in the comments section below. Alternatively, you can contact Richard directly on Twitter or through his blog.

I really hope you’ll consider backing the project on Kickstarter. Richard has really taken the time to develop a top class product that I think you’ll really enjoy using.

 You can support the Kickstarter and get hold of a ProtoCam by visiting this page.