Awhile back I started a project to build a digital "film" cartridge for Super-8 movie cameras. I made some progress but got hung-up by the limitation of my skills and reliance on off-the-shelf parts. Like many projects when I hit a wall, it went into a box and got shelved in the archives until something brought it back to the front of my mind. In this case it was a conversation with our Director that caused me to revisit the project. We were talking about what makes a camera feel like a "movie camera", old cameras that felt this way and what on the market today has that same feel. The concensus was that neither of us could think of a contemporary camera that feels like "indie cams" of the DV days, and I started thinking about the cameras I've used that embody this feeling. What came to mind was the German Super-8 camera I used, and this reminded me to revisit the DV8 project. Since I last worked on DV8 a lot has changed. There is a much wider assortment of camera hardware avaliable, and I've also learned how to design printed circuit boards that I can have manufactured to high-quality standards. I've also started working seriously with the ESP32 microcontroller which may be sufficient for this application. This device is much smaller than even the smallest Raspberry Pi, which is what I tried to use previously. So the next step is to take some of this new hardware and see how far I can get with off-the-shelf parts. If I can get acceptable results, and I'm able to embed one of these modules in such a way to get a proper image, I may be able to realize an initial version of the DV8 cartridge without custom electronics. If not, I should be able to design the hardware I need. Either way if the cartridge works I'll be doing some field testing to see if it lives up to my imagined potential. If it does, and if it appeals to other filmmakers, I'll design a follow-up model that is more suitible to "mass" production. For now, here's a few references: * https://www.uctronics.com/download/cam_module/OV2640DS.pdf * https://kopimojo.blogspot.com/2019/10/micropython-v1.html * https://github.com/shariltumin/esp32-cam-micropython * https://github.com/tsaarni/esp32-micropython-webcam * https://forum.micropython.org/viewtopic.php?t=6593