ADDING night VISION TO THE RASPBERRY PI video camera

After months of promises, the Raspberry Pi video camera is finally heading out to hackers and makers across the world. Of course the first build with the Pi cam to grace the pages of Hackaday would be removing the IR filter, and it just so happens [Gary] and his crew at the reading hackerspace are the first to do just that.

As [Gary] shows in his video, the process of removing the Pi cam’s IR filter is extremely fiddly.  Getting the filter out of the video camera involves removing the sensor, gently cutting it open with a scalpel, and finally gluing the whole thing back together with a tiny bit of superglue. not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for anybody without a halfway good bench microscope.

If you’re searching for a Raspberry Pi-powered safety and security camera, game camera, or something for an astronomy application, this is the way to make it happen. You might want to be careful when removing the IR filter; [Gary] broke one video camera on their first attempt. They got it to work, though, and the picture quality looks pretty good, as seen in the videos below.