Cameras literally keep me up at night. Seriously I’m not kidding. Most nights of the week I’m working on my Raspberry Pi baby monitor project. The baby monitor market is saturated all sorts of products exist so why bother? Why not? I love it! It’s fascinating. I’m learning a few APIs I hadn’t had previous exposure to. More importantly how do you not get excited about capturing light in silicon, converting it to electrons, and storing it as binary? Did you know that some of the noise your cell phone so furiously tries to smear away is actually caused by the quantum particle nature of light? Yeah seriously. It’s called shot noise look it up. That shot noise can then be used to approximate how many photons were collected by the sensor during an exposure. Pretty cool right? Well if that doesn’t bake your noodle try this: pull out your cellphone, get your TV remote control, turn on your front facing camera point the business end of your remote control at your camera and push it’s buttons. See a weird purple light? BOOM! Congratulations you just saw infrared light! *mic drop* Camera sensors see a spectrum that is broader than what the human eye sees, sometimes a little too broad, so much so many manufactures apply various filters to ensure it only sees what we see. In fact, if you try this with your more expensive back facing camera or other digital cameras you may not see the IR at all. I’m rambling but you get the point. I love this stuff!