That is a well-thought concept. I especially like the idea to attach the components to the lens and the camera itself to the smartphone magnetically, like a Mag-Safe charger to a laptop.
But here’s the question:
Since the camera lens is not connected hardware-wise to the phone - how will the data (pictures) be transferred to the phone? I estimate the phone’s display will be served as the viewfinder and the pictures will be stored in the phones flash drive. I could imagine that the camera lens will be connected via bluetooth, but wouldn’t it result in a too low data transfer rate? When I transfer pictures from my phone to my laptop via bluetooth it takes several seconds per picture. An alternative Idea regarding the data transfer I could think of is to attach a cable from the lens to the charging port.
Yeah, Bluetooth alone wouldn’t work too well, with its 3 Mbit/s you’d be either sending an HD feed at like 10fps or 480p at 30 fps.
My best suggestion would be for the lens to create a wifi network as soon as it’s turned on that an iPhone can connect to. Some new wifi chips are pretty fast at that, takes only a few seconds.
And depending on how overengineered you can imagine this thing to be, you can even use both — with Bluetooth LE maintaining connection and giving you access to the viewfinder as soon as possible (at lower fps), and then wifi kicking in several seconds later.
Fantastic work! Looked at the pencil sharpener too.
Made basically as a thought experiment — I tried to come up with a seamless and easy to use system with various accessories, like lenses, filters and blinds, that wouldn’t feel clunky.
