I posted some updates on twitter/mastodon but I figured I could give a heads up in this thread too.
I updated the prototype to make it more compact and portable, and I made some improvements to the playdate app.
It runs at about 3 fps (the image feed, not the entire app) and I still haven't taken the time to look at why it's not faster. I suspect it's the serial though. Anyway it's quite useable as is, arrow buttons cycle through 7 different dithering modes, A button saves a picture as .gif into the apps's Data folder. No need to use system level screenshots anymore! Makes it much faster and more convenient to take pictures!
I've started adding some status information on the screen. Maybe it'll become a DSLR style overlay, for now it's on the side.
Here are some examples I took today.
Next up, maybe add brightness or contrast control, maybe build a camera roll gallery thing although the SDK's scale method destroys dithered images so it'll probably need to be a full screen roll...
I also just had an idea of using the crank to record short animated gifs, like an old school camera. Maybe saving the data as an image quilt and then having an external tool to convert that back into gif/video ?