The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced a month ago that it has built a tiny camera that can be hooked up to the little ARM-based computer. It's expected to be sold sometime in April for $25, but today the foundation said it will give 10 pre-production models away for free to whoever comes up with the most creative uses for the camera.

"We want you to try to get the camera doing something imaginative," Community Manager Liz Upton wrote. "Think about playing around with facial recognition; or hooking two of them up together and modging the images together to create some 3d output; or getting the camera to recognize when something enters the frame that shouldn’t be there and doing something to the image as a result. We are not looking for entries from people who just want to take pictures, however pretty they are."

The contest is open until March 12, and ideas can be sent to iwantacamera@raspberrypi.org.

The Raspberry Pi foundation first started talking about building a camera module in May of last year. At the time, it was 14 megapixels, but the foundation noted that it might drop this number down to keep it affordable. It appears that the final version will use the OV5647, a 5-megapixel CMOS image sensor from OmniVision. The entire camera module will be 8×8×4mm, and it will attach to pins on the Pi board with a ribbon cable.

The module is basically just a sensor and lens and thus needs to get instructions from the Pi in order to act as a camera. It will be capable of taking 2592×1944 still images and video of up to 1080p.

The purpose of the contest is to test the hardware before it becomes generally available.

"The reason we’re giving these cameras away is that we want you to help us to do extra-hard testing," Upton wrote. "We want the people we send these boards to do something computationally difficult and imaginative with them so that the cameras are pushed hard in the sort of bonkers scheme that we’ve seen so many of you come up with here before with your Pis, and so that we can learn how they perform (and make adjustments if necessary). The community here always seems to come up with applications for the stuff we do that we wouldn’t have thought of in a million years; we thought we should take advantage of that."

One bonus tidbit involving a TARDIS

A while back we wrote about a high altitude ballooning project which sent a Raspberry Pi to near space and then transmitted live images down to Earth. The guy who built that, Dave Akerman, just sent a "TARDIS" to near space as part of his fourth Raspberry Pi weather balloon flight. Akerman's blog post on the TARDIS project is worth checking out.

In addition to the 10 camera modules being given out in the contest, the Raspberry Pi foundation said it already set aside one for Akerman. It would be hard to say he hasn't earned it.