It’s high time us Muggles got our hands on the hardware used to take Magical Photographs as seen in The Daily Prophet. The first pioneering step in that direction has been taken by [Abhishek] who built this moving picture taking polaroid-ish camera, which he’s calling the “Instagif NextStep”. It’s a camera that records a short, three second video, converts it to GIF and ejects a little cartridge which displays the animated photo.
This amazing piece of hardware has been painstakingly built, and the finished product looks great. The nice thing about building such projects, in [Abhishek]’s own words, is that “it involves a bunch of different skill sets and disciplines – hardware, software, 3D modeling, 3D printing, circuit design, mechanical/electrical engineering, design, fabrication etc that need to be integrated for it to work seamlessly.”
His delightful photo album has lots of pictures detailing the build from start to finish. The enclosure and all of the internal mechanical parts are 3D printed but require access to a SLA printer. The electronics BoM is a pretty long list. The main camera, called CamPi, has a Raspberry Pi 3 with its companion camera module, a 2.8” TFT screen, a 10000 mAh power bank, a servo and a bunch of assorted parts. The GIF cartridge, called SnapPi, has its own Raspberry Pi Zero W, another 2.8” TFT screen, a 400 mAh LiPo and a boost charger. Several of the modules had to be trimmed in size and many unnecessary parts removed to make it all fit together.
The two Pi’s form an ad-hoc network with each other for communication and data transfer. Most of the work is done by Python and Node scripts communicating over RPC. When the shutter button is pressed, a three second video is recorded on the CamPi. It is converted and compressed before being sent over the network to the SnapPi. A slow fade in is the hallmark of Polaroid photos, and the SnapPi emulates this by implementing one of two different methods (selected in code) to achieve the fade in effect. Essentially, he is generating a GIF with gradually increasing opacity. This in itself is an awesome hack.
He has documented all of the problems that he faced and describes how he solved each of them, making the task of replicating this camera easier. Plus, there’s a few handy guides in there for those new to hacking such as how to make your own printed circuit boards and how to setup a Raspberry Pi from scratch. If looking at this has you itching to build one, worry not. [Abhishek] has not only published the photographs with descriptions, but provided a detailed BoM with links and everything else required to build this is available from his GitHub repository.
If you’d like to see more of [Abhishek]’s projects, check out Peeqo, the Animatronic Head Responds with Animated GIFs.
Thanks for tipping us off on this, [Hobson].
Sauce in the gallery
Newer iPhones already do this whenever you take a photo. The difference is you can’t hold that moving photo in your hand though, which is what makes this build really cool.
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
What appendage do you hold your phone with?
What is cool is that with a cheap enough ‘film’, you could readily give these away, set up attractive displays with multiples, and many other creative uses.
Cool. But why GIF when actual video formats exist?
I understand that GIF’s are very popular on trendy social media platforms. Kids these days!
Twitter will at least convert it to a mp4 in the backend, even if they lie about it being a gif in the ui.
Lot of sites do that, like Imgur. Bothers the shit out of me when someone calls any silent, looping video a GIF, though.
For the same reason it’s shaped like a Polaroid, I suspect.
Looking at the source on Github, it actually uses MP4
It’s so sad that GIF with its 256 colors and often awful and extremely painful to watch dithering continues and animated PNG still doesn’t get a chance.
And if some powerful mogul is controlling the world with an all consuming hate for PNG, can’t they then at least add more colors and make up their own format, maybe call it SGIF for special GIF or something.
I mean look at the technology we are at in 2017 and then look at freaking GIF which should have retired in 1998.
And no, just playing MP4/WEBM and removing the sound and pretending it’s GIF to the public doesn’t do it.
> just playing MP4/WEBM and removing the sound and pretending it’s GIF to the public doesn’t do it.
Why not? MP4 and other video codecs are purpose built for moving images.
PNG/MNG/similar is terrible for videos filmed from the real world. It could potentially be good for animations or powerpoint slides I guess…
Video codecs are for video and used in video containers as it should be, and what we need additionally is an image format that does animation.
There already is a successor of sorts and it is what Apple uses for those animated images in messages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG
That was my original pitch, animated PNG also known as APNG.
But the PNG group refuses to make it official and so many browsers don’t want to support it, it’s vexing.
There’s also an old variant called MNG which I read was not supported with some lame excuse as ‘the browser code becomes too big’ which is a real laugh these days.
To quote:
Mozilla browsers and Netscape 6.0, 6.01 and 7.0 included native support for MNG until the code was removed in 2003 due to code size and little actual usage, causing complaints on the Mozilla development site. Mozilla later added support for APNG as a simpler alternative.
But it is slowly growing in regards to support for APNG in browsers, very very slowly.
But even if they all finally did, you’d still need tools to create them, and those are available but rather simplistic.
Does apple have tools for it? Because Apple pushing it could really move things along, maybe one day leading to adobe also supporting it in products. Maybe another 100 years from now, which is only 10 less than the time they might finally support the MKV container :/
This is a 140MB GIF, people. It’s insane.
Why not start saving our JPEGs as PNGs and then embed those PNGs into PDFs while we’re at it? That’s how stupid those huge “video” GIFs are.
Why not print each frame on an actual instant film, and make a flip-book with it.
Wow. Just wow.
“Impressive. Most Impressive” – Darth Vader
I can see this thing in the Harry Potter catalogs if you made it look like an old Argus C3 (the camera that Colin Greevy carried in the HP films). Seriously, that’s a fine hack!
It seems to have been done:
http://www.instructables.com/id/60-year-old-digital-camera/
// Praise Google!
Maybe I’m getting old – I understood nothing in the first sentence of this post.
It’s not a matter of age. Most of the “old” people I interact with have read Harry Potter or at least get the references.
Define OLD. I’m 62 and remember the original SX-70 and I have that stainless steel and leather trimmed work of art in my closet, but not a harry potter fan and never read the books. I have to presume that by old you mean people in their 30’s and 40’s
A book/movie series lasting from 1997-2011, Harry Potter. The magical wizard newspaper (The Daily Prophet) had printed photographs that were animated, because magic.
‘Muggle’ was the questionably-racist term used by wizards to refer to humans that couldn’t participate in their magical lifestyle.
Simply bookmark http://www.urbandictionary.com to look up trending terms.
Lovely!
How about attaching an accelerometer to help the photo “dry” faster by shaking? (but I don’t know if the Polaroid OneStep uses that “old” type of instant material or the “new” one which should not be shaken…)
There was never a reason to shake any Polaroid photos. Not the oldest B&W ones that needed a protective stop-and-fixer coating, and not any of the newer ones. The song “Shake it like a Polaroid” was bad advice set to music. I know this from having used much of the product line from the Model 95 and its rolled film (around 1954) through the Model 180 (with a Kodak lens and a sheet-fed pull-it-through film pack) to the Model 600 color.
I’m not old and I’ve never seen harry potter
The idea and execution are just fantastic. Very cool.
I would have been more impressed if he used a 556.
The thing about polaroids, which is always ignored and not transferable through movies and TV and video, is the very specific chemical smell they emitted when developing a picture.
And you still can’t easily emulate that with an arduino, nor a raspi.
I suppose the same can be said for laser printing and photocopies, the smell is a big part of the experience but people never mention it since it’s just one of those things you don’t mention. So at one time far in the future people will think they understand the photocopy/laserprinter experience from movies and video but not realize they miss a good chunk of the experience.
Youtube with smells would be terrible.
Ugh! You got that right.
Yecch!
Would include a percentage of BBQ smells though.
BBQ’d hair and skin mostly. Ick.
super cool right from the very concept of the gif cartridge to the implementation. !!
if they made that cartridge to work in the old SX 70 film cameras, they would have something I would buy
Oh great a RPI 3 oh great GIF oh great, Meanwhile WEBM
It’s odd that it uses moving images in the first place, but I guess the idea is to be able to publish them into forums, and so you end up with GIF and not a video container.
I like it!