new poetry camera! now taking custom orders
our biggest update yet
Someone emailed us recently asking, “Are you still working on Poetry Camera?” Oh boy, are we ever:
We’ve been hard at work over the last few months on a total redesign. We’re taking our first custom orders — fill out this form to get started.
Update: 2024 custom orders are sold out! We’ll keep the form open for 2025 requests.
It’s a whole new device inside and out. Now the camera is much more polished, reliable, and easy to assemble.
As a reminder, this is was our previous version — what we internally called “V4” — which used a Raspberry Pi. It took ~2 minutes to start up before you could use it, and had a battery life of ~2 hours.
The changes we made in our total redesign (internal name “v5”) include:
Switching out the “brains” of Poetry Camera to something more compact and reliable — from a Raspberry Pi to an industry-standard, consumer-grade ESP32 microcontroller. Thanks to this new chip, the camera only takes a few seconds rather than a few minutes to start up.
Redesigning the enclosure for a more elegant profile, easier production, and faster assembly.
Designing a new power circuit with a rechargeable LiPo battery, which extends our battery life to at least several days of use. We’re still optimizing the power consumption and finalizing our battery of choice, but we definitely don’t have to deal with recharging every few hours.
Making custom PCBs (printed circuit boards) to house all our new electronics.
Making the poems more varied and interesting, while still keeping the “essence” of a Poetry Camera poem — that it feels like it’s capturing the moment in photographic verse.
It used to take us at least 3 days to produce and assemble a single unit of the older design. Now it takes us about half a day to produce and assemble a unit of the new version, plus time for customizations and new design improvements as we go.
Needless to say, with so many changes, Ryan and I have been learning a ton. Neither of us have worked on a project like this before — which is a huge part of the fun! — so we knew we had to bring in experts to help. So much of this redesign has been thanks to our new collaborators Evan Kahn and Moyukh Chatterjee, who are firmware and electrical engineering pros who helped us level up this next version into something polished and reliable. We’ve also been fortunate to get guidance on the enclosure design from Annie Cardinal and Luis Velazquez.
As luck would have it, just as we were getting close to our first full prototype of this redesign, a new customer came calling — Anthropic! For those who aren’t familiar, Anthropic makes the Claude series of Large Language Models, which are the best on the market. Coincidentally, their model sizes are denoted by poems — Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus. We’ve been using Anthropic’s models to power Poetry Camera, so it was a no-brainer for us to make a custom order for them.
A few days ago, they brought it to the Tate Modern in London, as part of an event celebrating a new art and technology exhibit. By all accounts, Poetry Camera was a hit :)
Now we’re ready to make some more.
Poetry Camera is an art project we made for ourselves, transitioning to a consumer product we make for other people. Even though it looks like a mass-produced consumer electronics device thanks to Ryan’s elegant new enclosure, each unit is still currently an experimental prototype. Each time we assemble a new camera, we make tweaks to improve its design and functionality. (Assembling Anthropic’s camera, for example, took 16 hours because we were adjusting the design of each physical part along the way.) So for now, we’ll keep making these one at a time.
We have capacity to fulfill up to 5 custom orders by the end of the year. Each of these units is $1500. We assemble each camera ourselves in our New York workshop. As an early customer, you can expect close customer support and maintenance. Your feedback will directly shape future iterations of Poetry Camera.
What’s custom about each camera? Well, we’ll work together to define that. Maybe it’s a custom color. Or maybe you want to customize your printout. Or maybe it’s a secret third thing.
Update: 2024 custom orders are sold out! We’ll keep the form open for 2025 requests.
We care deeply about making Poetry Camera as accessible to people as possible.
That’s why we’ve had the open-source DIY version since the beginning.
The reality of building hardware, though, is that you can only make something good for cheap if you produce it at scale. As we iterate on the camera and optimize our design and production, we’ll be able to make larger batches of the camera at lower price points.
If you’re an artist, poet, or photographer interested in a collab to experiment with the camera, please email us at hello@poetry.camera. We’d love to find other ways to make the camera accessible to you.
Making hardware is a long journey — especially when you’re doing this as a labor of love, especially when you’re bootstrapping, especially when you want to make something you can be proud of — so thank you for being along for the ride.
Other stuff happening in Poetry Camera land!
We ran a workshop at RISD, in Kelin’s class on designing with AI…
We brought the camera to more events, from conferences to our friends’ weddings…
And people from around the world have continued to build their own Poetry Cameras and share them with us. I absolutely love all the vintage and custom camera enclosures that people use. It’s always such a delight to see someone’s own spin on the camera. Please keep sending us your creations!
This is amazing! What a creative idea. Congratulations on all of your coverage!