A blog post published by the Raspberry Pi foundation offers the first look at an experimental camera module that is designed to plug into the organization’s popular $35 Linux computer. The camera component, which will likely be available for purchase later this year, is relatively small. The foundation says that it is “ideal for some robotics and home automation applications people have been wanting to build.”

The Raspberry Pi foundation was originally established to produce a low-cost Linux computer that students can use to learn computer programming. The $35 computer, which is a bare board with a 700MHz ARM11 CPU and 256MB of RAM, has attracted the interest of Linux enthusiasts and embedded computing hobbyists. The foundation partnered with two manufacturers who are struggling to meet the high demand. The first units began shipping last month.

The camera component is a small extension board with a ribbon cable that connects to pins on the Raspberry Pi board. The prototype version of the camera has a 14-megapixel optical sensor, but the foundation says that the final version might be less powerful in order to keep the price down. They haven’t said yet how much it will cost to purchase.

Writing software that integrates with a camera on Linux isn’t as hard as you might imagine. Thanks to the powerful GStreamer framework, you can do a lot of cool things without much difficulty. You can have a look at this slightly old Python GStreamer tutorial for an example. The camera seems like a very appealing feature for enhancing the Raspberry Pi board.