ASCII camera with the Holga 120d

So now I’ve finished my digital Holga project, one of the things I wanted to do was to get a bit creative with it – so here’s my first attempt at an ASCII art generating camera.

This uses the ASCII art script written by Steven Kay, please visit his blog to find out more – I’ve modified the original script to use the python picamera library – this helps speed up the image resize. There’s also a timestamp added to the text file which uses the same script I wrote about in my previous Holga post.

If you just want to run Steven Kay’s script you’ll need the python imaging tools – install with

sudo apt-get install python-imaging

Here’s my modified script:

'''
ASCII Art maker
Creates an ascii art image from an arbitrary image
Created on 7 Sep 2009

@author: Steven Kay
'''

import time
import picamera
from PIL import Image
import random
from bisect import bisect

# greyscale.. the following strings represent
# 7 tonal ranges, from lighter to darker.
# for a given pixel tonal level, choose a character
# at random from that range.

greyscale = [
            " ",
            " ",
            ".,-",
            "_ivc=!/|\\~",
            "gjez2]/(YL)t[+T7Vf",
            "mdK4ZGbNDXY5P*Q",
            "W8KMA",
            "#%$"
            ]

# using the bisect class to put luminosity values
# in various ranges.
# these are the luminosity cut-off points for each
# of the 7 tonal levels. At the moment, these are 7 bands
# of even width, but they could be changed to boost
# contrast or change gamma, for example.

zonebounds=[36,72,108,144,180,216,252]


#take photo

with picamera.PiCamera() as camera:
                        camera.capture('image.jpg');

# open image and resize
# experiment with aspect ratios according to font


im=Image.open(r"image.jpg")
im=im.resize((160, 75),Image.BILINEAR)
im=im.convert("L") # convert to mono

# now, work our way over the pixels
# build up str

str=""
for y in range(0,im.size[1]):
    for x in range(0,im.size[0]):
        lum=255-im.getpixel((x,y))
        row=bisect(zonebounds,lum)
        possibles=greyscale[row]
        str=str+possibles[random.randint(0,len(possibles)-1)]
    str=str+"\n"

print str

date_string = time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%H:%M:%S")

text_file = open('image' + date_string + '.txt', "w")
text_file.write(str)
text_file.close()

There are lots of settings to tweak – the image above was generated by the script – and bear in mind this is designed to be viewed with black text on a white background. Perhaps I’ll see if I can dig out an old dot matrix printer from somewhere.

For a blog of ‘photos’ updated whenever I take them and am in range of WiFi check out:

http://holga120d.blogspot.co.uk/

This emails the ASCII art in HTML format to blogger whenever I take a photo (and the Pi Holga is in range of the internet).

For more about the Digital Holga check out my previous blog posts on the hardware and building the case.