Nan mais ce qui est dingue, c'est, c'est la première fois que j'en vois une, en vraie, une Kineuton! Simon Jérémi, from the funniest French comedy La Cité de la peur, eclaimed in front of the Kinoton projector he'd been dreaming of since childhood. Project Simon aims to build a 35 mm film scanner with a Raspberry Pi.

Edit me

Note: If you came here expecting to find a fully fonctionnal product, unfortunately it’s not finished yet! Hopefully, if you feel so inclined, you can help contribute to one of the many repo listed here

Warning: Website under construction

Project Simon

The Project Simon is an open-source film scanner build around affordable DIY / maker friendly stuff as :

Raspberry Pi computer (model 4 8Go is currently tested, should work with other Pi 4 and Pi 5 models)
An HQ camera module
3D printing pieces

Why Simon ?

The project name comes from the French comedy La Cité de la peur by Alain Barberian and les Nuls, where one of the main character is called Simon Jérémy.

Important: What?!? You’ve not watch the movie yet? Please, stop everything you’re doing and come after once you’ve seen it!

Meanwhile in Vera Cruz… During the Cannes Film Festival, every projectionist of Red is Dead, a “so bad it’s good” slasher, is murdered by a copycat of the movie’s killer. Meanwhile a investigation is lead, we follow Odile Deray, Red is Dead publicist, Simon Jérémy, its intellectually disabled movie star and Serge Karamazov, their bodyguard and self-proclaimed womanizer.

In one scene, Simon reveals that he had always wanted to be a projectionist, against his father’s wishes to make him an actor. Thus giving his name to this project. But, it can also stand for Scanner d’Images Mouvantes d’Origine Non-numérique ¹ in the language of Molière.

Software

libcamera

Quoting libcamera documentation, libcamera is a complex camera support library for Linux, Android and ChromeOS.

Project Simon uses its own fork of Raspberry Pi’s libcamera repository to be able to manage other camera sensor as IMX294 sensor made by Will Whang. More sensors may come if I’m able to buy some.

rpicam-apps

This part is related to libcamera-based applications to configure the cameras on a Raspberry Pi board. The whole Project Simon camera configuration application will be based on this repository.

Hardware

For now, it’s only been tested on a Raspberry Pi 4, with an official HQ camera v1.0.

It should work with any newer boards and official cameras.

Footnotes

Moving Image Scanner of Non-digital Origin : English translation of the project acronym. But we lose the word play. ↩