Here you go:
Doodle Cam-Devlog #1
So Doodle Cam is a camera I’m building on a Raspberry Pi that takes a photo and turns it into a cool art style, kind of like a filter but on a real camera. There’s no printing, you just plug it into your computer with a USB cable to get the pictures off. Right now I’m writing all the code in Python on my laptop first before I put it on the Pi. At first I wanted to make it look like a kid’s crayon drawing. I tried doing it with just OpenCV code, then I tried using AI with the Replicate API. The AI looked the best, but I figured out it can’t run on a Raspberry Pi because it’s way too slow, and it also costs money for every picture. So I switched to doing everything offline with OpenCV instead. I changed the first preset to a black-and-white pencil sketch since OpenCV is actually really good at that, and I’ve been tweaking it a bunch, removing the background, smoothing the photo, adding dark outlines so the face shows up, and adding shading so it looks more like a real drawing.
Next I want to get the code running on the actual Raspberry Pi with the camera. After that I’ll add a little screen so you can see the sketch right after you take the photo. Then I’ll set it up so the Pi shows up like a USB drive when you plug it in, add a button to take pictures and switch presets, and make more styles like cartoon and watercolor.
