A crafty maker called Mitxela has taken an old Polaroid camera and converted it to use a Raspberry Pi Zero and a thermal printer. The build itself is interesting and involved replacing the innards with the necessary circuitry for the Pi and printer. Where the magic really lies, though, is in the software. Rather than using a stock Raspbian image, Mitxela crafted his own Linux distro using buildroot that shaves loads of time off the typical boot cycle, taking the boot down to around 2 seconds! For an embedded Pi project, that’s outstanding! You can see a complete build log with dozens of photos here. A video of the camera in operation is below:

Thanks to Hackaday for spotting this one.