Repairing A RED Cinema Camera On The Cheap

July 25, 2026 by No comments

[ALT CINE] took a punt recently when purchasing a damaged RED Komodo camera online. In functional form, the 6K-capable camera sells for several thousand pounds (or dollars, or euros), whether used or brand new. However, [ALT CINE] was able to score the damaged unit for just £700. The question was—could it be repaired and turned back into a functional camera?

Things looked promising from the drop. The camera had just 3 hours of usage recorded in the firmware, and the casing seemed to suggest it had little use. However, the problem was soon revealed to be serious as the image sensor itself appeared to be damaged. Some research provided hope though—that the damage could be limited to a glass layer in front of the sensor itself that had delaminated.

Thankfully, disassembling the camera was easy enough thanks to its modular design, and [ALT CINE] soon had the sensor block on the bench for further examination. The cause of the issue was apparent—overzealous cleaning leading to fluid getting stuck to the rear of the filter in front of the sensor. Simply popping off the filter, cleaning and drying it properly, and reassembling, was enough to get the camera back to fully operational status.

RED’s repair service quoted $695 for a glass filter swap and $1,395 for a full sensor change. In contrast, [ALT CINE] was able to demonstrate that this repair was something easily within the realm of an intermediate camera tinkerer and it cost almost nothing to achieve. The video also covers an alternative potential repair route, wherein a DSMC2 filter can be subbed into a Komodo camera if the damage to the filter glass is otherwise unrecoverable.

It’s rare to get this lucky when it comes to repairing big-dollar cinema cameras like this one. We’ve featured some other great deep-dive camera repairs before, too. Continue reading “Repairing A RED Cinema Camera On The Cheap” →

A baby blue hatchback with red accents drives down a road with blurry trees and a blue sky in the background.

ICCU Monitor Logs Data In E-GMP EV Failures

July 25, 2026 by 4 Comments

EVs are less mechanically complicated than their combustion kin, but that doesn’t mean they’re immune to component failure. The Integrated Charge Control Unit (ICCU) has been the main failure point in recent Hyundai/Kia EVs, and ICCU Observer is an attempt to log data from the systems to find the culprit.

The ICCU handles all charging and voltage conversion duties from 800 V down to 12 V in the E-GMP platform EVs from Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis. The main failure mode appears to be when the circuit charging the 12 V fails, eventually rendering the vehicle inoperable. While the rate of failure is relatively low, the exact numbers are unknown, and Hyundai has remained quiet on if they know what’s causing it.

Unsurprisingly, speculation is rampant with owners experiencing failures relaying similarities and differences to others with the same problem. In an effort to bring actual data to the process, [broadwall] has started working on an open data set of information collected over the vehicle’s OBD II port in an effort to pinpoint similarities between the vehicles that have experienced failures.

Hyundai is currently replacing the failed units under warranty (recently expanded to 15 years in most markets), but that’s little comfort when you’re sitting on the side of the road waiting for a tow. These failures stand out in an otherwise easy to maintain platform, so hopefully this effort will lead to a permanent fix instead of merely swapping out for a new unit.

If you’d like to explore data analysis a little further, how about using astrophotography to detect exoplanets or learning more from Stanford?

3D Printed Go Kart Designed To Fit In A Suitcase

July 24, 2026 by 1 Comment

[Ivan Miranda] is famous for his large-scale 3D printed vehicles. They’re pretty fun, but they’re also pretty big and heavy—which can make transporting them around rather impractical. Hence, when he had reason to travel with a 3D printed go kart, he went back to the drawing board to create something light enough to pack in regular plane luggage.

The build started with some major compromises compared to [Ivan]’s previous go kart build. Notably, there are only three wheels instead of four, and a simplified control layout that eschews a regular steering wheel. These decisions were made to save weight and allow the design to be more compact. The kart uses a set of handles either side of the rider to handle steering. Drive is via a brushless motor, with power supplied from a series of 18 V drill batteries. Parts were produced on [Ivan]’s massive printer which comes in handy on large-scale projects like these.

All in all, the final build weighed around 20 kg. That’s light enough to be broken down across checked luggage and carry-on for a typical flight. We’d consider the project a success on that basis, even if quite a bit of assembly was required upon arriving at the destination. [Ivan]’s other builds in this realm are pretty fun too, from the printed scooter to the ride-on tank.

Continue reading “3D Printed Go Kart Designed To Fit In A Suitcase” →

Fast Volumetric Imaging Of Seizures With Adaptive Optics Light Sheet Microscopy

July 24, 2026 by No comments
Seizure in zebrafish larva imaged using AO setup. (Credit: Bingxi Liu et al., Biomedical Optics Express, 2026)
Seizure in zebrafish larva imaged using AO setup. (Credit: Bingxi Liu et al., Biomedical Optics Express, 2026)

Key to understanding something like epilepsy is to be able to record highly transient events in biological tissues. Generally this is done using light sheet microscopy, which provides effectively a 2D ‘slice’ of the tissue in question, but to observe a brief event in a larger biological system you need to be able to rapidly change the layer and focus between the virtual layers. This is what [Bingxi Liu] et al. al did using adaptive optics with an electrically tunable lens (ETL) in order to capture seizures in the brain of zebrafishes.

Their system can capture a volume of 499 × 499 × 150 μm3 at 4 volumes per second, which is large enough to fit optically transparent zebrafish larva into. The optical setup is shown in the above image, with the design based on the OpenSPIM platform for selective plane illumination microscopy.

Here the 488 nm laser provides the illumination (excitation) of the layer, while the 543 nm laser is for calibration purposes. The ETL is thus in the imaging path that allows for capturing by a digital camera, while a beam splitter directs part of the captured data to a Shack-Hartmann wave front sensor (SHWFS), which is part of the adaptive optics system.

After a seizure was induced in the zebrafish larva using the drug pentylenetetrazol the results were recorded using this system. It showed the seizure’s origin in the posterior brain, with subsequent propagation to the anterior before subsiding gradually over tens of seconds.

This system should be quite useful even outside of seizure research, as there are a lot of 3D systems in biology where having a relatively high-speed microscopic capture can be very revealing.

Hands-Free Mouse Uses Eyes And Muscles Instead

July 24, 2026 by 3 Comments

The standard computer mouse is a perfectly useful peripheral if your hands work. If you’ve got some trouble in that area, you might appreciate an alternative input solution. To that end, [Varun Adinath Patil] created a neat hands-free solution for moving a cursor around a screen.

The build is based on the Neuro PlayGround Lite, a board built for physiological signal acquisition in the Feather form factor. It’s hooked up to an IMU sensor—both a MPU6050 or BMI270 work—which tracks head movements to allow the cursor to be panned around the screen. Other biological signals are then used to activate other standard mouse functions. Clenching the jaw fires off a left click, while a triple blink fires a right click. Clicking and dragging is achieved by a double-blink. The jaw muscles are sensed via EMG signals picked up with gel electrodes on the skin, while the blinks are detected via EOG signals via the same contact points.

Commercial solutions in this realm exist, but it’s great to see how such a device can be built from the ground up. We’ve looked at other neat applications of head-tracking before, too. If you’re working on your own innovative accessibility tools, don’t hesitate to let us know via the tipsline.

Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency And LLM-Generated Code Projects

July 24, 2026 by 48 Comments

Community-led open source project hosting site Codeberg has formally announced that projects whose code is largely or fully machine-generated through LLMs and other ‘AI’ tools will no longer be welcome. This follows on the heels of a similar ban on cryptocurrency-related projects.

The community vote was on two issues, the first being the notion that scraping of project code for the use in LLMs should be forbidden, which was a motion that easily passed. The second motion was on disallowing projects whose code was substantially generated by LLMs like Claude, OpenAI Codex, and similar. This motion passed with 358 in favor versus 144 against.

In the earlier linked blog post the reasoning behind especially this second issue is expanded upon, covering not only ‘license whitewashing’, but also the direct and indirect hardware costs, with the expanding ‘AI’ datacenter hyperscaling having massively increased hardware costs for Codeberg over the past years, as the costs have been largely externalized.

Also covered is also the aspect of these LLM-based tools destroying the OSS community, which is something that is backed up by recent studies. Even if we ignore that such LLM-tools are destroying the cognitive abilities of its users, there’s an argument to be made that if LLM-scraping is disallowed, then it’s consistent to also not allow LLM-generated code.

In the Terms of Use you can see these changes, both for LLMs and for cryptocurrency projects.

Thanks to [mk-fg] for the tip.

E-ink Writing Deck Rocks A Typewriter Aesthetic

July 24, 2026 by 2 Comments

[Myth Made] has a goal to get into writing. However, she likes to do things the aesthetic way, rather than the easy way. Thus, she has eschewed simple word processing on a conventional computer, instead choosing to build a remarkably attractive writing deck styled after a classic typewriter.

The keycap marking technique is worth watching the video for on its own.

The build began with a mechanical keyboard with a compact layout. The square keycaps were swapped out for custom 3D printed versions that were rounded to suit the desired look. [Myth Made] used a neat technique where the caps were colored in with a paint marker and then ran through a laser engraver to bond the paint to the surface to make all the key markings.

With the input side sorted, the rest of the build could progress. The typewriter shell was printed in multiple parts, and then welded together with acetone. This was then covered with an ABS-acetone solution that helped remove some of the surface artifacts, before priming and paint. As for the electronics side, a Raspberry Pi Zero runs the show, hooked up to a Waveshare e-ink display which can be cranked up and down like a piece of paper coming out of a typewriter. There’s also a lovely 7-segment display which displays the current word count.

It’s a fun build that looks utterly joyous to use. Sometimes leaning into the aesthetic side of a project is what makes it so magical.

Continue reading “E-ink Writing Deck Rocks A Typewriter Aesthetic” →