The versatility of the Raspberry Pi never ceases to amaze us–today’s project reaches into the field of photography. Maker Benjamin Bezine’s project, RoboScan uses a Raspberry Pi to automatically scan old rolls of analog film to develop them into individual digital photos.

According to Bezine, this Pi creation was developed as a lockdown project. In addition to the Raspberry Pi, it uses a DSLR camera to capture individual photos on the roll. The frame is constructed using every developer’s foundational tool, Lego.

Bezine integrated machine learning with the help of Google’s Coral Tensor Processing Unit to help determine when a photo is within the proper frame boundaries. He also added a web interface that can be used to both control and monitor the system while it scans.

Photos are automatically saved to the Pi as they are scanned. Users can then use  Samba to sync the photo data to a remote PC or other storage device. Bezine reported a performance output of around 6 frames per minute, including the time it takes to sync the photo to his PC.

You can check out this project in action and read more in the full post on Reddit. If you want to recreate it at home, check out the source code on GitHub. Visit our list of Best Raspberry Pi Projects for more cool creations from the Pi community.