February 16, 2026
Say cheese, then rewind
Camera that captures photos to cassette tape
Retro camera saves your selfies to cassette — nostalgia lovers scream yes, pragmatists yell why
TLDR: A DIY camera records photos as audio on cassette tapes, then plays them back to rebuild the image — a retro-tech magic trick. Commenters are split between giddy nostalgia (Pixelvision vibes, “I want one”) and eye-roll pragmatism (“why not SD cards?”), but everyone agrees it’s weird, clever, and charming.
Internet, meet the camera that snaps a photo and literally records it onto a cassette tape — and the comments are on fire. Nostalgia fans are swooning, calling it “Pixelvision 2.0” and dropping links to the 1980s toy camcorder that did something similar, like the Fisher-Price Pixelvision blast from the past. The other half of the crowd? Laugh-crying and asking why anyone would rewind a selfie like it’s a mixtape.
The DIY build uses a tiny ESP32 camera, turns the image into an audio whistle called SSTV (slow-scan TV — an old radio trick to send pictures), records that onto tape, then plays it back into a Raspberry Pi Pico chip that decodes the picture. The maker even battled tape wobble and hiss with smarter filtering, so you don’t need a fancy deck. Translation: it’s part science fair, part art project, all vibes.
Strongest take: it’s gloriously pointless — and perfect. One side says it’s the ultimate hipster camera and demands a kit (“shut up and take my Walkman”). The skeptics fire back: “Just use an SD card!” Meanwhile, jokers ask if your face sounds better on the A-side or B-side and whether tape hiss counts as a filter. Either way, the comment section agrees on one thing: they can’t stop watching this techno time machine sing photos into spools of brown ribbon.
Key Points
- •The project stores camera images on audio cassette tapes by encoding them as SSTV signals.
- •An ESP32-CAM captures photos and generates Martin M1 SSTV audio, recorded directly to cassette.
- •Playback audio is decoded by a Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) to reconstruct images, based on Jon Dawson’s decoder.
- •Robustness improvements address tape speed instability, adding filtering, better sync recovery, and reduced false detections.
- •Features include USB serial image export via Processing, a TFT display, and physical controls for flash, time-lapse, snapshot, audio preview, and charging management.