Taking pictures in the 21st century is incredibly easy. So easy in fact that most people don’t even own a dedicated camera; from smartphones to door bells there are cameras built into nearly electronic device we own. So in this era of ubiquitous photography, you might think that a very slow and extremely low resolution camera wouldn’t be of interest. Under normal circumstances that’s probably true, but this single pixel camera built by [Tucker Shannon] is anything but normal.

At the heart of his unusual camera is the TCS34725 RGB color sensor from Adafruit which receives a tightly focused beam of incoming light by way of a 3D printed enclosure and a 3mm OD aluminum tube. This allows an Arduino Uno to determine the color of this tiny slice of light, making up a single pixel of the final color image. [Tucker] notes that you could even swap the color sensor out for a simple photocell if you don’t mind a black & white image at the end of the process.

In either event, once the light has been analyzed the sensor is repositioned autoturret-style by way of dual BYJ-48 stepper motors. This process continues on, spiraling outwards until the whole image is stitched together from these individual readings

Now compared to the camera in your phone, the resulting image might be a bit underwhelming. We’d say it’s a bit like looking at a digital picture on an 8 bit computer, but in truth even that might be overly generous. But even if it isn’t as crisp as modern eyes would like there’s no question that it’s certainly a recognizable image, which is all [Tucker] was shooting for.

Of course if your optical frugality is such that even this low-resolution camera is too sharp for your tastes, we’ve seen a similar concept using a roof-mounted solar array.