DIY Pan And Tilt Camera Mount

August 23, 2023 by 2 Comments

Pan and tilt mounts have a number of uses that can increase the functionality of various types of cameras. Security cameras can use them to adjust the field of view remotely, astronomers can use them as telescope mounts to accurately track celestial objects, and of course photographers and videographers can use them to add dynamic elements to shots. But getting the slow, smooth, and reliable movement isn’t as simple as slapping some servos on a tripod. So unless you want to break the bank for a commercial mount, this DIY pan and tilt mount might be the way to go.

The mount is built largely out of 3D printed parts and a few fairly common motors, belts, pulleys, and bearings. The movements are controlled using stepper motors, and there are two additional systems built in so that focus and zoom can be controlled through the system as well. The software controlling it all is open-source and  available on GitHub, and controls the mount remotely through a network connection. It’s also designed to use the readily-available ESP32 chip, making it overall fairly adaptable.

The system doesn’t slouch on features, either. It can move from one point to another with various programmable speeds, has a key sequencer for more complex movements, and can accommodate the needs of stop motion animators as well. It’s an impressive build that should be accessible to plenty of photographers with a 3D printer and the right parts, but photography and astronomy aren’t the only reasons to use a pan and tilt mount. Check out this one that brings some sunlight to a shaded room.

2023 Cyberdeck Challenge: CyberTapeDeck

August 23, 2023 by 9 Comments

There seem to be two schools of thought when it comes to picking an enclosure for your cyberdeck project: you either repurpose the carcass of some commercially produced gadget, or you build a new case yourself. The former can lead to some very impressive results, especially if your donor device is suitably vintage, but the latter is far more flexible as the design will be based on your specific parameters.

But for the CyberTapeDeck, [Matthew] decided to take a hybrid approach. The final product certainly looks like it’s built into a 1980s portable tape deck, but on closer inspection, you’ll note that the whole thing is actually 3D printed. The replica doesn’t just nail the aesthetics — it also includes the features you’d expect from the real thing, including an extendable handle and functional buttons which the internal Raspberry Pi 3 sees as a macropad thanks to an Arduino Pro Micro.

A seven inch LCD stands in for the tape door, and while it unfortunately doesn’t look like [Matthew] was able to replicate the opening mechanism to angle the display, you can at least stand the whole thing on its end to provide a more comfortable viewing experience.

[Matthew] says one of the intended purposes for this cyberdeck is to get his son excited about working with electronics and programming, so in a particularly nice touch, he’s mounted a terminal block over the “speaker” that ties into the Pi’s GPIO pins. This provides a convenient interface for experimenting on the go, without getting tangled up in exposed wiring.

We appreciate that [Matthew] has released the STL files for all of the printed parts, because even though it makes a great cyberdeck, the design is begging to house a faux-retro media player.

2023 Hackaday.io Cyberdeck Challenge

Linux Fu: The Old School Terminal

August 23, 2023 by 40 Comments

Maybe you have a vintage old-school computer. Maybe you have a replica. Maybe you just want to run SIMH and relive the glory days of CP/M or VMS. The problem is, it looks kind of silly to have CP/M running in your beautiful X11 terminal window full of 3D animations, opacity effects, and special fonts. You could buy an old CRT monitor. That would be cool, too, because on a modern screen, you don’t get scan lines and all the crummy artifacts that go along with an electron beam and phosphor display device. Or you can grab retro-cool-term.

Star Trek on CP/M

Even if you don’t have an old computer, the program will work fine to simply run your shell for everyday use. Confound the youngsters when they see your terminal with scan lines and CRT jitter updating the latest packages.

What Is It?

If you want a shell in a GUI, you used to use xterm, although most people use something more modern. I use Konsole, but some like RXVT or whatever terminal your distro favors. Cool-retro-term is just a replacement for this. By default, it only opens a shell prompt.

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Improving A Kodak Film Digitizer

August 23, 2023 by 12 Comments

Despite the near-complete collapse of its ecosystem in the face of portable videocassette camcorders in the 1980s, somehow the 8 mm format, smallest of the movie films, has survived the decades. There’s a special aura around an 8 mm image which electronic recordings don’t replicate, plus for film makers there’s an attraction to working with real film. Unsurprisingly almost all of the devices used with 8 mm film have ceased to be manufactured, but a few items escaped the cut. It’s still possible to buy an 8 mm digitizer for example, and it’s one of these with a Kodak brand that [Mac84] has. Unsatisfied with its image quality, he’s set about tinkering with its firmware to give it some video adjustment possibilities and remove its artifact-prone artificial sharpening.

Helped by the device having a handy EEPROM from which to extract the code, he was able to recover the firmware intact. From here on he was in luck, because the digitizer’s Novatek CPU is shared with some dash cams and this had spawned a hacker scene. From there he was able to find the relevant area and adjust those settings, and after a few false starts, re-flash it to the device.

The results can be seen in the video below the break, and perhaps reveal much about what we expect from an image in the digital age. The sharpened images look good, until we see untampered versions which are closer to the original.

If you don’t have a Kodak scanner you can always build one yourself, and meanwhile like many people we are still wondering what happened to that new Super 8 camera they announced in 2018 but never released.

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Sharkskin Coating Reduces Airliner Fuel Use, Emissions

August 23, 2023 by 66 Comments

The aviation industry is always seeking advancements to improve efficiency and reduce carbon emissions. The former is due to the never-ending quest for profit, while the latter helps airlines maintain their social license to operate. Less cynically, more efficient technologies are better for the environment, too.

One of the latest innovations in this space is a new sharkskin-like film applied to airliners to help cut drag. Inspired by nature itself, it’s a surface treatment technology that mimics the unique characteristics of sharkskin to enhance aircraft efficiency. Even better, it’s already in commercial service! Continue reading “Sharkskin Coating Reduces Airliner Fuel Use, Emissions” →

Guitar Distortion With Diodes In Code, Not Hardware

August 23, 2023 by 14 Comments

Guitarists will do just about anything to get just the right sound out of their setup, including purposely introducing all manner of distortion into the signal. It seems counter-intuitive, but it works, at least when it’s done right. But what exactly is going on with the signal? And is there a way to simulate it? Of course there is, and all it takes is a little math and some Arduino code.

Now, there are a lot of different techniques for modifying the signal from an electric guitar, but perhaps the simplest is the humble diode clipping circuit. It just uses an op-amp with antiparallel diodes either in series in the feedback loop or shunting the output to ground. The diodes clip the tops and bottoms off of the sine waves, turning them into something closer to a square wave, adding those extra harmonics that really fatten the sound. It’s a simple hack that’s easy to implement in hardware, enough so that distortion pedals galore are commercially available.

In the video below, [Sebastian] explains that this distortion is also pretty easy to reproduce algorithmically. He breaks down the math behind this, which is actually pretty approachable — a step function with a linear part, a quadratic section, and a hard-clipping function. He also derives a second, natural exponent step function from the Schockley diode equation that is less computationally demanding. To implement these models, [Sebastian] chose an Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi, using an ADC to digitize the guitar signal and devoting a DAC to each of the two algorithms. Each distortion effect has its own charms; we prefer the harsher step function over the exponential algorithm, but different strokes.

Kudos to [Sebastian] for this easy-to-understand treatment of what could otherwise be a difficult subject to digest. We didn’t really expect that a guitar distortion pedal would lead down the rabbit hole to diode theory and digital signal processing, but we’re glad it did.

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Wooden Wide-Angle Wonder Wows World

August 23, 2023 by 9 Comments

An old-fashioned film camera can be an extremely simple device to make, in that as little as a cardboard box with a pin hole in it will suffice. But that simplicity at heart leaves endless scope for further work, and a home-made camera can be every bit as much a highly-engineered object of beauty as its commercial stablemate. A great example comes from [Aaron Cré], whose desire for something close to a Hasselblad XPan panoramic camera led him to build his own equivalent out of wood.

The video below the break shows in detail how the wooden case is crafted, and how a lens mount ring sawn from a lens adapter is mounted on the front of it. He’s skipped making all the tiresome parts of the camera associated with winding and film transport and instead taken them from a cheap plastic snapshot camera. The original aspect ratio is stretched by cutting the guts of the snapshot camera apart, and extended to make a 75 mm long negative which also exposes over the sprocket holes.

The final camera is carefully finished to the point at which it really looks the part as well as taking those striking wide-angle photographs. We’re not photography buffs enough to identify the lens and shutter combination he’s using, but we can’t help envying him the results. Fancy making your own 35 mm camera too? Here’s another, in case you need inspiration.

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