File:Nerd-Tographer Desk Ornament (9698639550).jpg

English: I'm used to a strange allotment of worth in my life. My truck barely worth the gas I put in it always has crazy expensive bikes and kites and skiing gear in it. But my work desk is normally pretty standard. I've got a few shiny Apple products for work and play, but recently I added a new desk ornament, which again throws off the value perceptions.

This is the result of many many many a long and stressful night spent on my Senior Design project at the University of Colorado. Basically, it is a just crazy fancy camera. I was tasked with building it up from scratch, starting with the sensor. That baby is a $5000, 5 Megapixel sCMOS sensor. It costs so much because it is more sensitive than any sensor in our pretty DSLRs, and reads out about 10x cleaner images. Oh, also it happens to read out at 100 FRAMES/SECOND, at full 16 bit resolution (higher than our fancy cameras too. The thing spits out gigabytes/second of data! This was my first time designing any electronic systems, so was pretty stoked when it finally worked.

Now, I have a few of these boards and 3 or 4 sensors sitting in boxes in my garage. At one point they were ridiculously expensive pieces of cutting edge technology, now they're just pretty pieces of silicon. Makes for a cool desk decoration though! Perfect mix of nerdiness and photography for me, always keeps me motivated when it catches my eye.

Here's our little engineering site/blog in case anyone is interested.

DayStar Engineering

More Places to find me: Zach Dischner Photography | 500px

Blog: 2manventure