Building Character with a Raspberry Pi

Everything looks better in ASCII, doesn’t it? For most of us, ASCII art probably brings back memories of pre-internet bulletin board systems from the early days of personal computing in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But the practice of carefully arranging letters and symbols to make art surprisingly dates all the way back to at least the 1860s. In those days, the technique was used to create portraits and other art (and probably memes with cats) with a typewriter, which would have otherwise been difficult to produce with the technology of the day.

We certainly no longer need to use ASCII art due to technical limitations, but what does necessity have to do with anything? We ASCII because we can! An engineer named André Esser recently took ASCII art to the next level by creating a camera that generates a real-time video stream of ASCII art. Have you ever wanted to see yourself in ASCII art? Esser’s camera is the perfect way to do it.

But the initial version of the software ran on a Mac laptop (boring!), and Esser wanted to show off the camera at this year’s Raspberry Pi Jam. Three days should be plenty of time to port the ASCII Video Camera to a Raspberry Pi (right?!?), so Esser got a table for the event and got to work.

Obviously anything related to technology is never as straightforward as it first seems in our minds. With a different camera and platform, Esser had some work to do to get the system running on a Raspberry Pi 3 computer. But after swapping some libraries and making some tweaks, it was once again producing ASCII video — at a low resolution and 3 FPS.

That’s not going to make for a good demonstration. After some debugging, Esser got it running in a high resolution mode, but still at only 5 FPS. Seemingly out of options for speeding things up in a meaningful way by tweaking software, Esser brought in the big guns — a Raspberry Pi 5. This again introduced some new hardware, and with it, more software tweaks. But it was definitely worth it. When the ASCII Video Camera was up and running on the Pi 5, it reached 29 FPS at high resolution. Ship it!

But naturally, the night before the event, everything crashed due to an apparent SD card failure. And with it, all of Esser’s work (remember to back up your projects, kids). Having everything freshly in mind, Esser was able to pull an all-nighter and reproduce the work, however. And it was all worth it to see how attendees, both young and less young, at Pi Jam loved playing with the ASCII Video Camera.

If you were not at the event, you can still see yourself in ASCII. Full source code for the project has been made available in a GitHub repository.