Hackaday Europe 2026: Project Gigapixel

The megapixel wars are over—but what if you could shoot billions of pixels in a single image? That's precisely what engineer Yannick Richter tackled with Project Gigapixel, presented recently at Hackaday Europe. Rather than cramming more sensors onto a chip, Richter had a simpler idea: salvage the linear scanning sensor from an old Epson flatbed scanner and mount it behind a quality Pentax medium-format lens. By repositioning this sensor and stitching the captured frames together, he produced photographs up to three point two gigapixels—forty thousand eight hundred by eighty thousand pixels. The hard part was interfacing the scanner's hardware to a Raspberry Pi to read the sensor, which required reverse-engineering Epson's documentation to decode how the custom CCD sensor works. The payoff is striking detail: zoom in and you can read the tiny codes printed on zero-six-oh-three surface mount resistors. The tradeoff is that the camera can't photograph moving subjects, but for still landscapes, architecture, and technical shots, Hackaday reports this is a remarkable proof that ingenious engineering can unlock incredible capabilities from hardware you might otherwise discard.

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