We first reported on the Sitina-1 a few months ago. This open-source camera is currently in development by electronics boffin Wenting Zhang, who is hand-building the device from the ground up. And in this YouTube video, Wenting reports on the latest progress of his rather ambitious project.
In the above video, he explains how he reconfigured the power management system to be more efficient, upped the frame rate of the live view display from a sluggish 3fps to a much more practical 14fps, and implemented image magnification to aid manual focusing, among other bits and pieces.
He also reveals a bunch of techie tricks he used to improve image quality over the previous version of the camera, and as Wenting narrates the video, he displays a selection of images taken by the device, and they're really pretty good.
The final change is that the latest build of the camera has a translucent shell, rather than the solid black of previous incarnations. While this has no material effect on the operation of the camera, I've got to admit, it looks really rather cool!
As it's an open-source project, Wenting shares all you need to know to have a go yourself on his Sinita-1 project page. Be warned though, it's certainly not for the faint-hearted and requires a good deal of electronics know-how, as well as the ability to write computer code. You'll also need a 3D printer to construct the physical casing for the camera, such as the Mars 5 Ultra.
