Panoramic Photography With A Linear Scanner

August 28, 2026 by 2 Comments

Although digital photography took a big bite of the film industry’s lunch, it wasn’t able to completely eliminate the need — or desire — for photographers to use film in some situations. But digital information from a camera sensor can be manipulated to augment the natural physical capabilities of a camera in ways not really feasible for film. High dynamic range images, focus and exposure stacking, and automatic panoramic stitching. This camera takes the latter example to the extreme.

[Philo]’s proof of concept was a smartphone camera set on a chair and rotated around a room. Some software grabbed a single column of pixels as it moved and stitched them all together to form an image. This came out well enough that the idea was refined a few times, but it wasn’t until a single-line digital camera meant for imaging assembly lines was found that this really took off. Using the camera and some custom software, [Philo] was eventually able to take some of the longest panoramic images we’ve seen, using things like railways and boats as the track the camera rides on, with accelerometer data to help stabilize the image.

The results speak for themselves. There’s a bit of wobble from the movement of the various vehicles despite the accelerometer data, but given that the image is coming from a sensor meant for examining conveyor belts, it’s hard to complain. Of course, if you want to stick to film, there are panoramic film cameras available too even if they don’t quite have the reach of this digital one.

A clear tank of gel is shown against a black background. In the gel, the shape of a white plastic boat is suspended. A coarse-tipped needle dips into the top of the gel bath.

Support Bath Enables An Epoxy Benchy

August 27, 2026 by 1 Comment

There’s plenty of substances that can theoretically be extruded from a nozzle, but only a regrettably small subset of them can actually be used for 3D printing. One limiting factor is the liquid range: too high a melting point and it’s hard to reliably extrude, too low and it tends to ooze and flow once extruded. Embedded 3D printing offers a way around this: it submerges the entire print in a shear-thinning support gel which keeps liquids in place until they solidify. [Riley] of Riley’s Lab recently built such a 3D printer and used it to print in silicone and epoxy.

In place of the extruder, [Riley] mounted a mostly 3D printed syringe pump, which allowed him to squirt out almost any liquid. For a test, he printed a tardigrade model out of cream cheese. This was a good test material for several reasons: it’s cheap, easy to extrude, and holds it shape well after extrusion. Silicone and epoxy, however, won’t hold their shape, which is where the support bath comes it. This was a mixture of mineral and vegetable oil, with some fumed silica added to make it thick yet shear-thinning. This lets it contain the extruded liquid, yet flow as the extrusion needle slices through it.

For the first test, [Riley] printed a Benchy out of Sylgard 184. The outcome looked good in the bath, bar some stringing, but it seemed to have limited adhesion between layers, and disintegrated upon removal from the bath. A second test with a two-part epoxy worked much better; it also had some stringing, but it held together while the bath was washed away in isopropyl alcohol, and even seemed decently shock-resistant afterwards.

It’s great to see a hacker working on this technology; we’ve previously covered a commercial take on it, as well as some of the research that led to it.

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Running Multiple Linux Kernels Without Hypervisor

August 27, 2026 by 7 Comments

In a move that’s no doubt going to trigger a lot of confusion and nostalgia, Mklinux is back, in a sense. As the announcement makes clear, this is multikernel Linux, not microkernel Linux, which is an experimental OS designed to run the Linux kernel as a user-space server running on top of OS X’s Mach kernel.

Naming overlap niggles aside, this neo-mklinux lets multiple independent Linux kernels run simultaneously on bare metal. There is still a host kernel which handles the carving up of hardware resources to the newly spawned kernels, but unlike with a hypervisor there are no abstraction or translation layers.

In theory this should mean basically perfect isolation between kernels, which is one of the main selling points along with increased performance. Compared to running KVM guests the provided benchmarks show much lower latency, at between parity to two times faster.

A website is provided with instructions to get started, along with architectural details if that’s your thing.

Rooftop Camper For Roofless Vehicle

August 27, 2026 by 16 Comments

The Honda Goldwing is one of the more famous motorcycles ever produced. It’s known for its reliability and comfort, but also for being one of the first motorcycles Honda rolls out new technology with. It was the first to have a factory-installed airbag as well as integrated GPS, and is now largely associated for being a sort of two-wheeled RV with how many creature comforts it supports for long-distance riders. [Matt] has a Goldwing of his own, and is taking that RV-like feeling to the extreme with a rooftop camper for this motorcycle.

Of course, motorcycles don’t have roofs, but if this Goldwing had one this camper would definitely be above that. Goldwings are already heavy enough without an enormous weight dramatically increasing the center of gravity, and [Matt] certainly had his problems with that along the way. But before this adventure he had modified it into a hill climber, removing a lot of the extraneous equipment from it. Attaching some metal frame and a lightweight camper shell to it didn’t seem like too much of a stretch from there, so he got to work with a welder. At the end he has a box that’s just barely big enough for him to sleep in but is more or less functional as a camper.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, [Matt] dropped this more than once on its maiden voyage, and one of those falls damaged a wiring harness that caused his battery to drain in the night. Luckily he was not too far from home on the test drive. We’d tend to think that this camper won’t be one that [Matt] keeps working on (although we’d imagine a tricycle kit might solve his center of gravity issues) but since he’s built some other interesting campers in the past we’re not too sure we’d count this one out just yet.

The Mactini: A Computer That Does Almost Nothing

August 27, 2026 by 4 Comments

Recently [Tucker Osman] brought to life what once was just a meme created by the BBC as it poked fun at Apple’s push for ever smaller devices that also dropped many features along the path towards questionable innovation. This ‘Mactini’ was a super-small laptop, with just a single button that did everything, befitting the overpriced more-money-than-sense status symbol vibe that [Jony Ive] brought to Apple.

The input method suggested in the BBC video involves convoluted patterns using the single button, which would be functional, albeit cumbersome. Even as [Tucker] set out on this mission to make the Mactini real, he had to answer a lot of questions, while sticking to the rules that it had to follow the rough form factor of the original and have the same features.

In lieu of overcomplicating things, he opted to use a 1.69″ ST7789V2-based SPI LCD along with a small RP2350-based board from Waveshare for the brains. Rather than just slapping the LCD example for the Pico board on it as firmware, he actually used DMA to do the screen data copying, freeing up a lot of CPU cycles.

The rest of the hardware was cobbled together from e-waste parts, including an iPad speaker and an audio amplifier from a scrap board. Video was handled using Motion JPEG decoding for a not-horrible-framerate. All of this was put into a 3D printed case that was designed in FreeCAD, to make the Mac that [Ive] could only have dreamed of back in the 2000s.

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The Farador Quack Medical Device

August 27, 2026 by 5 Comments

Over the centuries there have been an incredible number of purported medical devices released onto the market, with some having more outrageous claims than others. Released in the 1910s and produced into the 1920s, the Farador electrotherapeutic device claimed to be a thermoelectric device that would cure all disease conditions. In a recent video over at the [Our Own Devices] channel we get an in-depth look at this device and its usage instructions.

It's a thermoelectric generator. Sort of. (Credit: Our Own Devices, YouTube)
It’s a thermoelectric generator. Sort of. (Credit: Our Own Devices, YouTube)

On the Smithsonian’s website you can see the version they’ve got. It’s not identical, but the working principle remains the same — after bypassing the whole ‘is this the right treatment’ questionnaire because it’s a cure-all device, you take the main metal device and its connected electrodes out of the box.

Unlike similar devices of the era that applied an actual electrical current using batteries or similar, this Farador purportedly uses thermoelectric power generation, but there’s no clear hot or cold side to what would be the generator. Despite this, about 20-30 mV can be measured across the electrodes, so surely it’s working?

As it turns out, the Farador is just one of many fake medical devices that cloned the original Electropoise. Naturally such devices have been disassembled by many over the past decades, and as it turns out they are all empty inside, or at least devoid of any mechanisms. Much like many of such fake medical devices today, they mostly bank on the placebo effect. This placebo effect can be so strong that it’s even a confounding factor in real medical trials and medicine.

The more involved and complex the purported medical treatment seems, the stronger the effect tends to be. For the Farador the complex instructions, apparently high-tech thermoelectric generator and such all help to create the illusion and could thus be construed to be the main feature of this product.

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All The Best Computers Boot To BASIC

August 27, 2026 by 22 Comments

Anyone whose first computing experience came in the form of an 8-bit home computer will tell you about booting straight into a BASIC interpreter. The machine invited you to program it, and no doubt many of our middle aged readers are here today because they ran with that.

Modern computers with their fancy 64-bit multitasking supercomputer operating systems may have lost that experience, but now thanks to [Tarjan] you can bring it back. They’ve produced Thoreau BASIC, a bootable bare-metal BASIC interpreter for x86 machines with UEFI.

It’s largely GW-BASIC compatible, but with a few upgrades for the 21st century. The available memory is now whatever the system reports, so imagine a BASIC machine with gigabytes of the stuff. And while it has all the old-style BASIC you know and love, it also has high-res 24-bit graphics, and can load bitmaps. There can even be multiple text windows, it’s BASIC as you have never seen it before.

We are not sure how many will take this interpreter and run with it, after all maybe those modern 64-bit operating systems can be rather useful at times. But we’re guessing there will be plenty who’ll at least have a play with it for old time’s sake. Meanwhile, BASIC is not the only piece of UEFI goodness we’ve brought you.