The Raspberry Pi gives you an awful lot of bang for your buck. It makes a great tabletop arcade machine, set top box, it’s provided the brains for driverless race car, and it’ll even shame Comcast for you when your connection sucks.

Someone’s always coming up with a new way to put the $35 Pi to work. Today’s installment: a machine that automatically digitizes open-reel films.

Joe Herman had a massive archive of treasured family videos that had been recorded by his grandfather. In total, there were 130 films, some of which were more than 70 years old. That kind of film isn’t as delicate as some people think. It’ll last a long, long time if properly cared for.

That said, it’s also not terribly easy to share with friends and loved ones in the 21st century. Sure, Clark Griswold had a projector up in his attic, but that was decades ago. They’re not that common anymore.

It’s a whole lot easier to share video footage by uploading files to a site like YouTube or Vimeo. Reel-to-reel projectors don’t generally come with upload capabilities, though, so Joe had to build that functionality himself.

Joe preferred going the low-cost DIY option to sending the films off to an expensive conversion service. He happened to have a spare Raspberry Pi and an old projector sitting around. With a couple of 3d-printed parts and a fair bit of tinkering, he converted the reel-to-reel projector into a Pi-controlled digital transfer machine.

The results are quite impressive. Joe’s frame-by-frame capture system has done an excellent job, and you can see for yourself over on his Vimeo channel. Here’s a sample:

Images: Joe Herman