A Forgotten Photographic Process Characterised

Early photography lacked the convenience of the stable roll film we all know, and instead relied on a set of processes which the photographer would have to master from film to final print. Photographic chemicals could be flammable or even deadly, and results took a huge amount of work.

The daguerreotype process of using mercury to develop pictures on polished metal, and the wet-collodion plate with its nitrocellulose solution are well-known, but as conservators at the British National Archives found out, there was another process that’s much rarer. The Pannotype uses a collodion emulsion, but instead of the glass plate used by the wet-plate process it uses a fabric backing.

We know so much about the other processes because they were subject to patents, but pannotype never had a patent due to a disagreement. Thus when the conservators encountered some pannotypes in varying states of preservation, they needed to apply modern analytical techniques to understand the chemistry and select the best methods of stabilization. The linked article details those analyses, and provides them with some pointers towards conserving their collection. We look forward to someone making pannotype prints here in 2025, after all it’s not the first recreation of early photography we’ve seen.

Malfunctional Timekeeping With The Vetinari Clock

Lord Vetinari from the Discworld series is known for many things, but perhaps most of all a clock that doesn’t quite keep continuous time. Instead, it ticks away at random increments to infuriate those that perceive it, whilst keeping regular time over the long term. [iracigt] decided to whip up a real world version of this hilarious fictional timepiece.

The clock itself is an off-the-shelf timepiece purchased from Target for the princely sum of $5. However, it’s been deviously modified with an RP2040 microcontroller hidden away inside. The RP2040 is programmed to tick the clock at an average of once per second. But each tick itself is not so exact. Instead, there’s an erraticness to its beat – some ticks are longer, some shorter, in the classic Vetinari style. [iracigt] explains the nitty gritty of how it all works, from creating chaos with Markov chains to interfacing the RP2040 electronically with the cheap quartz clock movement.

If you’ve ever wanted to build one of these amusements yourself, [iracigt’s] writeup is a great place to start. Even better, it was inspired by an earlier post on these very pages! We love to see the community riff on a theme, and we’d love to see yours, too – so keep the tips coming, yeah? Video after the break.

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Shrinking Blinky As Far As Possible

Many of us know the basic Blink Arduino sketch, or have coded similar routines on other microcontrollers. Flashing an LED on and off—it doesn’t get much simpler than that. But how big should a blink sketch be? Or more importantly, how small could you get it? [Artful Bytes] decided to find out.

The specific challenge? “Write a program that runs on a microcontroller and blinks an LED. The ON and OFF times should be as close to 1000 ms as possible.” The challenge was undertaken using a NUCLEO-L432KC Cortex-M4 with 256 K of flash and 64 K of RAM.

We won’t spoil the full challenge, but it starts out with an incredibly inefficient AI & cloud solution. [Artful Bytes] then simplifies by switching to an RTOS approach, before slimming down further with C, assembly, and then machine code. The challenge was to shrink the microcontroller code as much as possible. However, you might notice the title of the video is “I Shrunk Blinky to 0 Bytes.” As it turns out, if you eliminate the digital code-running hardware entirely… you can still blink an LED with analog hardware. So, yes. 0 bytes is possible.

We’ve featured the world’s smallest blinky before, too, but in a physical sense rather than with regards to code size.

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The Everlasting Hunt For The Loch Ness Monster

When a Loch Ness Monster story appears at the start of April, it pays to check the date on the article just to avoid red faces. But there should be no hoax with this one published on the last day of March, scientists from the UK’s National Oceanography Centre were conducting underwater robotics tests in Scotland’s Loch Ness, and stumbled upon a camera trap lost by Nessie-hunters in the 1970s. Just to put the cherry on the cake of a perfect news story, the submarine in question is the famous “Boaty McBoatface”, so named as a consolation after the British Antarctic Survey refused to apply the name to their new ship when it won an online competition.

The Most Extreme Instamatic in The World

An NOC scientist holds the camera in its container
Sadly the NOC haven’t released close-ups of the inner workings of the device.

The camera trap has survived five decades underwater thanks to a sturdy glass housing, and appears to be quite an ingenious device. A humble Kodak Instamatic camera with a 126 film and a flash bulb is triggered and has its film advanced by a clockwork mechanism, in turn operated by a bait line. Presumably because of the four flash bulbs in the Kodak’s flash cube, it’s reported that it could capture four images. The constant low temperature at the bottom of a very deep loch provided the perfect place to store exposed film, and they have even been able to recover some pictures. Sadly none of then contain a snap of Nessie posing for the camera.

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Philadelphia Maker Faire Returns This Weekend

While there’s still a vaguely robot-shaped hole in our heart from the loss of the New York World Maker Faire, we do take comfort in the fact that smaller Maker Faire events are still happening all over the world, and some of them have managed to gain quite a bit of momentum over the last few years.

If you’re in the Northeast US, the Philadelphia Maker Faire is your best bet to scratch that peculiar itch that only seems to respond to a healthy blend of art, technology, and the occasional flamethrower. It will be returning to the Cherry Street Pier this Sunday, April 6th, and pay-what-you-can tickets are on sale now. The organizers encourage each attendee to only pay what they are able to afford, with several options ranging from zero to the $25 supporter level.

A look through the exhibits shows the sort of eclectic mix one would expect from a Maker Faire. Where else could you practice picking locks, learn how biodiesel is made, see a display of kinetic sculptures, and stitch together a felt plush monster, all under one roof?

There’s even a few projects on the list that regular Hackaday readers may recognize, such as the ultra-portable Positron 3D printer and the DirectTV dish turned backyard radio telescope built by Professor James Aguirre.

We’ve made the trip to the Philadelphia Maker Faire several times since its inception in 2019, and although it had the misfortune of starting right before COVID-19 came along and screwed up all of our carefully laid plans, the event has managed to find a foothold and continues to grow each year.

On Egyptian Pyramids And Why It’s Definitely Aliens

History is rather dull and unexciting to most people, which naturally invites exciting flights of fancy that can range from the innocent to outright conspiracies. Nobody truly believes that the astounding finds and (fully functioning) ancient mechanisms in the Indiana Jones and Uncharted franchises are real, with mostly intact ancient cities waiting for intrepid explorers along with whatever mystical sources of power, wealth or influence formed the civilization’s foundations before its tragic demise. Yet somehow Plato’s fictive Atlantis has taken on a life of its own, along with many other ‘lost’ civilizations, whether real or imagined.

Of course, if these aforementioned movies and video games were realistic, they would center around a big archaeological dig and thrilling finds like pot shards and cuneiform clay tablets, not ways to smite enemies and gain immortality. Nor would it involve solving complex mechanical puzzles to gain access to the big secret chamber, prior to walking out of the readily accessible backdoor. Reality is boring like that, which is why there’s a major temptation to spruce things up. With the Egyptian pyramids as well as similar structures around the world speaking to the human imagination, this has led to centuries of half-baked ideas and outright conspiracies.

Most recently, a questionable 2022 paper hinting at structures underneath the Pyramid of Khafre in Egypt was used for a fresh boost to old ideas involving pyramid power stations, underground cities and other fanciful conspiracies. Although we can all agree that the ancient pyramids in Egypt are true marvels of engineering, are we really on the cusp of discovering that the ancient Egyptians were actually provided with Forerunner technology by extraterrestrials?

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Bringing Achievements To The Nintendo Entertainment System

Microsoft made gaming history when it developed Achievements and released them with the launch of the Xbox 360. They have since become a key component of gaming culture, which similar systems rolling out to the rest of the consoles and even many PC games. [odelot] has the honor of being the one to bring this functionality to an odd home—the original Nintendo Entertainment System!

It’s actually quite functional, and it’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. What [odelot] created is the NES RetroAchievements (RA) Adapter. It contains a Raspberry Pi Pico which sits in between a cartridge and the console and communicates with the NES itself. The cartridge also contains an LCD screen, a buzzer, and an ESP32 which communicates with the Internet.

When a cartridge is loaded, the RA Adapter identifies the game and queries the RetroAchievements platform for relevant achievements for the title. It then monitors the console’s memory to determine if any of those achievements—such as score, progression, etc.—are met. If and when that happens, the TFT screen on the adapter displays the achievement, and a notification is sent to the RetroAchievements platform to record the event for posterity.

It reminds us of other great feats, like the MJPEG entry into the heart of the Sega Saturn.

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