Scanning Analog Film For The Last Time

June 19, 2020 by Lewin Day 44 Comments

Film cameras are capable of great resolution, and for a long time were superior in this regard to their digital successors. However, it’s now possible to store digital copies of analog images in superior detail, so [Jan] built a rig to scan their photos for the last time.

The general idea is to take a high enough resolution scan of film negatives or slides, such that there is no need to rescan the images when technology moves forward. To achieve this, [Jan] decided to employ a DSLR to photograph the materials in question. To do this quickly and accurately, with minimal fuss, special lens hoods were 3D printed to hold slides in perfect register in front of the lens. With a flash to provide even light, the results are excellent. Film negatives proved harder, requiring a carefully designed transport mechanism to avoid damaging the fragile materials. With some perseverance, the final tool worked well.

It’s a tidy way of digitally archiving analog photos, and with the resolution of modern cameras, one needn’t worry about lost resolution. We’ve seen mechanised builds for handling other formats too, such as this 8mm scanner. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Scanning Analog Film For The Last Time” →

Divvy Out The Crypto With This Physical Bitcoin Faucet

March 9, 2020 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

For those unfamiliar with the term, a “Bitcoin Faucet” is usually used as an incentive in software that wants your attention. Complete a captcha or look at and advertisement and you get one millionth of a BTC, that sort of thing. You’re never going to get rich off of one of them, but most people aren’t going to turn down free money either. The latest project from [TJ Bruno] follows that same concept and brings it into the physical world. But you still aren’t going to get rich off of it.

The hardware used for this corporeal Bitcoin Faucet is pretty simple. All you need is a Raspberry Pi, a camera module, and a 2.8″ touch LCD. Naturally you could use a larger screen if you wanted, but then it wouldn’t fit inside of the very slick 3D printed stand that [TJ] developed. We might consider upgrading to a slightly speedier Pi though, in the demonstration video it looks like the Zero is struggling pretty hard to handle the GUI.

Using the Faucet is straightforward enough. You tap the screen and place a QR code representing your Bitcoin wallet on the device’s tray, where it’s scanned by the camera. In a few seconds the Faucet shows a QR code on its own screen that will point your phone’s browser to the transaction details so you can verify your digital coinage is on the way.

You might be wondering why you’d want to have a device that sits there waiting to pay out fractions of a BTC to anyone who’s willing to flash their wallet at it. We’re not entirely sure, though it might make for an interesting way to raise awareness about cryptocurrency. In this particular case though, [TJ] says he was just looking for a project that would give him an excuse to hone his Python skills. Nothing wrong with that around these parts.

Watching the growth of cryptocurrency from our unique vantage point, we can see how the hacker’s interest in Bitcoin as changed over the years. Where we once saw people excited about building custom mining rigs, we now see counters that tick down as the last coins are put into circulation. Looking at projects like this, it seems hackers are happy enough to just give the things away in an interesting way.

3D Print Your 3D Scanner

February 19, 2020 by Al Williams 15 Comments

[QLRO] wanted a 3D scanner, but didn’t like any of the existing designs. Some were too complex. Some were simple but required you to do things by hand. That led to him designing his own that he calls AAScan. You can see the thing operating in the video below.

In general, you can move the camera around the object or you can move the object around while the camera stays fixed. This design chooses the latter. You’ll need a stepper motor with a driver board and an Arduino to make the turntable rotate. You also need a computer running Python and Meshroom. The phone also has to run Python and [QLRO] used QPython on an Android device.

Continue reading “3D Print Your 3D Scanner” →

2D-Scanner Records Surfboard Profiles For Posterity

October 6, 2019 by Dan Maloney 5 Comments

[Ryan Schenk] had a problem: he built the perfect surfboard. Normally that wouldn’t present a problem, but in this case, it did because [Ryan] had no idea how he carved the gentle curves on the bottom of the board. So he built this homebrew 2D-scanner to make the job of replicating his hand-carved board a bit easier.

Dubbed the Scanbot 69420 – interpretation of the number is left as an exercise for the reader, my dude – the scanner is pretty simple. It’s just an old mouse carrying a digital dial indicator from Harbor Freight. The mouse was gutted, with even the original ball replaced by an RC plane wheel. The optical encoder and buttons were hooked to an Arduino, as was the serial output of the dial indicator. The Arduino consolidates the data from both sensors and sends a stream of X- and Z-axis coordinates up the USB cable as the rig slides across the board on a straightedge. On the PC side, a Node.js program turns the raw data into a vector drawing that represents the profile of the board at that point. Curves are captured at various points along the length of the board, resulting in a series of curves that can be used to replicate the board.

Yes, this could have been done with a straightedge, a ruler, and a pencil and paper – or perhaps with a hacked set of calipers – but that wouldn’t be nearly as much fun. And we can certainly see applications for this far beyond the surfboard shop.

3D-Printed Film Scanner Brings Family Memories Back To Life

September 4, 2019 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

There is a treasure trove of history locked away in closets and attics, where old shoeboxes hold reels of movie film shot by amateur cinematographers. They captured children’s first steps, family vacations, and parties where [Uncle Bill] was getting up to his usual antics. Little of what was captured on thousands of miles of 8-mm and Super 8 film is consequential, but giving a family the means to see long lost loved ones again can be a powerful thing indeed.

That was the goal of [Anton Gutscher]’s automated 8-mm film scanner. Yes, commercial services exist that will digitize movies, slides, and snapshots, but where’s the challenge in that? And a challenge is what it ended up being. Aside from designing and printing something like 27 custom parts, [Anton] also had a custom PCB fabricated for the control electronics. Film handling is done with a stepper motor that moves one frame into the scanner at a time for scanning and cropping. An LCD display allows the archivist to move the cropping window around manually, and individual images are strung together with ffmpeg running on the embedded Raspberry Pi. There’s a brief clip of film from a 1976 trip to Singapore in the video below; we find the quality of the digitized film remarkably good.

Hats off to [Anton] for stepping up as the family historian with this build. We’ve seen ad hoc 8-mm digitizers before, but few this polished looking. We’ve also featured other archival attempts before, like this high-speed slide scanner.

Continue reading “3D-Printed Film Scanner Brings Family Memories Back To Life” →

A Real All-In-One Printer Should Have A Computer In It, Too

August 16, 2019 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

With printers generally being cheaper to replace than re-ink, there are plenty of cast-offs around to play with. They’re a great source for parts, but they’re also tempting targets for repurposing for entirely new uses. Sure, you could make a printer into a planter, but slightly more useful is this computer built into a printer that still prints.

This build is [Mason Stooksbury]’s earlier and admittedly useless laptop-in-a-printer build, which we covered a few months back. It’s easy to see where he got his inspiration, since the donor printer’s flip-up lid is a natural for mounting a display, and the capacious, glass-topped scanner bed made a great place to show off the hybrid machine’s guts. But having a printer that doesn’t print didn’t sit well with [Mason], so Comprinter II was born. This one follows the same basic approach, with a Toshiba Netbook stuffed into an H-P ENVY all-in-one. The laptop’s screen was liberated and installed in the printer’s lid, the motherboard went into the scanner bay along with a fair number of LEDs. This killed the scanner but left the printer operational, after relocating a power brick that was causing a paper jam error.

[Mason]’s Comprinter II might not be the next must-have item, but it certainly outranks the original Comprinter on the utility spectrum. Uselessness has a charm of its own, though; from a 3D-printed rotary dial number pad to a useless book scanner, keep the pointless projects coming, please.

Developing An Automatic Tool For CAN Bus Hacking

July 22, 2019 by Tom Nardi 25 Comments

In the old days, a physical button or switch on the dashboard of your car would have been wired to whatever device it was controlling. There was potentially a relay in the mix, but still, it wasn’t too hard to follow wires through the harness and figure out where they were going. But today, that concept is increasingly becoming a quaint memory.

Assuming your modern car even has physical buttons, pushing one of them likely sends a message over the CAN bus that the recipient device will (hopefully) respond to. Knowing how intimidating this can be to work with, [TJ Bruno] has been working on some software that promises to make working with CAN bus user interfaces faster and easier. Ultimately, he hopes that his tool will allow users to rapidly integrate custom hardware into their vehicle without having to drill a hole in the dashboard for a physical control.

But if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like to have things done for them (a safe bet, since you’re reading Hackaday), don’t worry. [TJ] starts off his write-up with an overview of how you can read and parse CAN messages on the Arduino with the MCP2515 chip. He breaks his sample Sketch down line by line explaining how it all works so that even if you’ve never touched an Arduino before, you should be able to get the gist of what’s going on.

As it turns out, reading messages on the CAN bus and acting on them is fairly straightforward. The tricky part is figuring out what you’re looking for. That’s where the code [TJ] is working on comes in. Rather than having to manually examine all the messages passing through the network and trying to ascertain what they correspond to, his program listens while the user repeatedly presses the button they want to identify. With enough samples, the code can home in on the proper CAN ID automatically.

The upside to all this is that you can activate aftermarket functions or hardware with your vehicle’s existing controls. Need an example? Check out the forward-looking camera that [TJ] added to his his 2017 Chevy Cruze using the same techniques.

Continue reading “Developing An Automatic Tool For CAN Bus Hacking” →