Day: December 29, 2022

Wear Your Fave Cassette Tapes As A Necklace With This 3D Printed Adapter

December 29, 2022 by 47 Comments

While packing merch for a recent gig, I realised I had the opportunity to do something a little fun. I’d released an album on tape, and spent a little extra to ensure the cassette itself was a thing of beauty. It deserved to be seen, rather than hidden away in a case on a shelf. I wanted to turn this piece of musical media into a necklace.

Of course, cassette tapes aren’t meant to be used in this way. Simply throwing a chain through the cassette would lead to tape reeling out everywhere. Thus, I fired up some CAD software and engineered a solution to do the job! Here’s how I built an adapter to turn any cassette tape into a cool necklace.

Find the design on Thingiverse, and more details below!

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Film Is Dead. Long Live Film, Say Pentax

December 29, 2022 by 44 Comments

If your answer to the question “When did you last shoot a roll of film” is “Less than two decades ago”, the chances are that you’re a camera enthusiast, and that the camera you used was quite old. Such has been the switch from film to digital, that the new film camera is a rarity. Pentax think there may be an opening in the older format though, as they’ve announced in the videos below the break that they’re working on a fresh range of film cameras to serve the enthusiast market.

We don’t know the economics of the camera business, but we’re certainly interested to see what they come up with. In a world that’s still awash with cheap film cameras from a few decades ago, whatever they produce will have to be good, but given that it’s Pentax who are making the announcement we’re guessing the quality will be of a high standard.

Perhaps more interesting in the revival of interest in film is that it comes at a point when designing and making your own camera has almost never been easier. If you’re bored waiting for the new Pentax, make your own!

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Shopping Cart Does The Tedious Work For You

December 29, 2022 by 36 Comments

Thanks to modern microcontrollers, basic home automation tasks such as turning lights on and off, opening blinds, and various other simple tasks have become common DIY projects. But with the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning the amount of tasks that can be offloaded to computers has skyrocketed. This shopping cart that automates away the checkout lines at grocery stores certainly fits into this category.

The project was inspired by the cashierless Amazon stores where customers simply walk into a store, grab what they want, and leave. This is made possible by the fact that computers monitor their purchases and charge them automatically, but creator [kutluhan_aktar] wanted to explore a way of doing this without a fleet of sensors and cameras all over a store. By mounting the hardware to a shopping cart instead, the sensors travel with the shopper and monitor what’s placed in the cart instead of what’s taken from a shelf. It’s built around the OpenMV Cam H7, a microcontroller paired with a camera specifically designed for these types of tasks, and the custom circuitry inside the case also includes WiFi connectivity to make sure the shopping cart can report its findings properly.

[kutluhan_aktar] also built the entire software stack from the ground up and trained the model on a set of common products as a proof-of-concept. The idea was to allow smaller stores to operate more efficiently without needing a full suite of Amazon hardware and software backing it up, and this prototype seems to work pretty well to that end. If you want to develop a machine vision project on your own with more common hardware, take a look at this project which uses the Raspberry Pi instead.