One of the more recent image editors is Google’s Nano Banana, the abilities of which have pleasantly surprised maker Nick Bild. And in true maker fashion, Nick has designed and built his own machine to take the best of Nano Banana and improve it. 

The problem that this build solves is Nano Banana’s clunky interface. In Nick’s own words, “the web interface is less than ideal. Upload an image. Type out a request. Wait. Download the result. Repeat for each image.” Banamera streamlines this process. It uses a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W with a Camera Module 2 and a 2.2-inch LCD screen to show the images. But there’s also an Adafruit I2S MEMS microphone that enables the user to speak editing instructions, which are turned into text and forwarded to the Nano Banana API. The results appear on the screen within seconds.