palazikASCII 📟

A high-performance Android camera app that converts live camera feeds into real-time ASCII art. Built with modern Android architecture, combining the declarative UI of Jetpack Compose, the advanced hardware access of CameraX, and a custom C++ (JNI) engine for blazing-fast image processing.

✨ Features

• Real-Time ASCII Engine: Processes raw YUV camera frames in C++ via JNI to calculate luma (brightness) and map it to an ASCII character ramp at ~30 FPS without dropping frames.
• Smart Multi-Lens Support: Uses a custom LensDetector reading deep CameraCharacteristics (aperture, focal length, and hardware levels) to correctly identify and cycle between Main, Ultrawide, Telephoto, and Front cameras—bypassing "fake" OEM auxiliary depth sensors.
• Dynamic Grid Scaling: Uses Compose Math to dynamically calculate the perfect monospace font size so the ASCII grid stretches beautifully from edge-to-edge on any device, from standard phones to high-res flagships.
• Retro CRT Aesthetic: Features a custom UI with animated CRT scanlines, a glowing terminal-green color palette, and a live blinking terminal cursor.
• Modern Stack: Built entirely in Kotlin, using StateFlow for state management, Jetpack Compose for UI, and CMake for the native layer.

🛠️ Tech Stack

• UI: Jetpack Compose
• Camera Pipeline: CameraX (camera-camera2, camera-lifecycle, camera-view)
• Native Processing: C++, JNI (Java Native Interface), CMake
• State Management: Coroutines, StateFlow, ViewModel
• Build System: Gradle (Kotlin DSL)

🧠 Under the Hood

The app relies on a carefully tuned pipeline to achieve real-time rendering:

1. Frame Capture: CameraX's ImageAnalysis grabs high-resolution YUV frames directly from the active camera sensor.
2. JNI Bridge: The raw byte array is passed asynchronously to the C++ layer.
3. Hardware Rotation Matrix: The C++ engine detects the physical orientation of the camera sensor (which is usually sideways inside the phone) and dynamically rotates the pixel coordinates.
4. Luma Mapping: The image is divided into a 64x128 grid. The C++ engine averages the brightness of the pixels within each cell and maps it to a dense character ramp ( .:-=+*#%@).
5. Recomposition: The resulting string is passed back to Kotlin and rendered natively in Compose, sized perfectly using BoxWithConstraints.

🚀 How to Build

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone [https://github.com/palazik/palazikASCII.git](https://github.com/palazik/palazikASCII.git)

2. Run GitHub Actions Workflow
3. Download .zip from Artifacts and install