Every nerd has looked longingly at the Raspberry Pi mini-computers at least once but not everyone has the imagination to use it for anything more than a very compact media centre PC. For the other folks, the new Pi AI Camera add-on could be just the thing to get that skunkworks Spot knockoff up and running.

Or perhaps it’ll just allow whatever your project happens to be to take better photographs. See, the Pi AI Camera is just what it sounds like — a Raspberry Pi-compatible camera sensor with integrated artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. Oh, and it’s also made with Sony’s involvement.

Raspberry Pi’s new flavour

The camera isn’t much to look at. That bit’s up to you, or that guy with a 3D printer who makes all your casings. But it’s based on Sony’s (specifically Sony Semiconductor Solutions) IMX500 image processor, so it’ll offer up performance that should at least match and probably exceed the R1,250 ($70) price tag.

But, unlike the Raspberry Pi AI Kit, which launched earlier this year at the same price, the Pi AI Camera is compatible with all of the brand’s boards, including the Pi Zero. The 12MP camera sensor offers users manual focus, 4K recording (at a paltry 10fps), and 30fps recording at 2,028 × 1,520. It includes an integrated RP2040 microcontroller that allows for “neural network and firmware management”.

The company goes into great detail about how the camera addition works, with demonstration videos showing both object and pose detection using Pi Camera frameworks Picamera2 and rpicam-apps. Project possibilities might be out of reach for the average person but for serious Pi hobbyists? The potential to build something really remarkable is there, no matter which version of the main board is being used.