Arnov Sharma built a working point-and-shoot digital camera, the PolyShot, around a Unihiker K10 dev board running an ESP32-S3, a 2-megapixel sensor, and micro SD storage, rather than buy a vintage model at an inflated price.
The hardware is deliberately minimal: a custom 3-button PCB handling shutter, gallery, and image navigation, with a battery compartment that doubles as a grip. The current build has a measurable flaw: a multi-second delay between pressing the shutter and capturing the image, making it useless for anything that moves. Battery life sits at roughly 3 hours per charge.
What makes this worth reading in full is where it goes next. Sharma plans to drop the Unihiker entirely and design a ground-up build using a bare ESP32-S3 module, which means the interesting engineering decisions, schematic tradeoffs, and lessons from this first iteration are directly relevant to anyone who wants to replicate or improve on it.
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