Shoot Instax Film In A Polaroid Camera With The Aid Of Tape

December 21, 2025 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

Polaroid cameras have been very popular for a very long time and are especially hot gifts this year. Fresh film is easy to find but relatively expensive. In contrast, Fuji’s Instax line of instant film and cameras aren’t as well established, but the film is easy to find and cheap. You might like to shoot cheap Instax film in your Polaroid camera. Thankfully, [Nick LoPresti] figured out how to do just that.

You can’t just slam an Instax cassette in an old Polaroid camera and expect it to work. The films are completely different sizes, and there’s no way they will feed properly through the camera’s mechanisms at all. Instead, you have to get manual about things. [Nick] starts by explaining the process of removing Instax film sheets from a cassette, which must be done without exposure to light if you want the film to remain useful. Then, if you know what you’re doing, you can tape it in place behind the lens of an old-school Polaroid camera, and expose it as you would any other shot. The chemistry is close enough that you’ll have a fair chance of getting something with passable exposure.

Once exposed, you have to develop the film. Normally, a Polaroid camera achieves this by squeezing the film sheet out through rollers to release the developer and start the process. Without being able to rely on the camera’s autofeed system, you need to find an alternative way to squeeze out the chemicals and get the image to develop. [Nick] recommends a simple kitchen rolling pin, while noting that you might struggle with some uneven chemical spread across the sheet. Ultimately, it’s a fussy hack, but it does work. It might only be worthwhile if you’ve got lots of Instax film kicking around and no other way to shoot it.

Instant cameras can seem a little arcane, but they’re actually quite simple to understand once you know how they’re built. You can even 3D print one from scratch if you’re so inclined. Video after the break.

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The Miracle Of Color TV

December 18, 2025 by Al Williams 36 Comments

We’ve often said that some technological advancements seemed like alien technology for their time. Sometimes we look back and think something would be easy until we realize they didn’t have the tools we have today. One of the biggest examples of this is how, in the 1950s, engineers created a color image that still plays on a black-and-white set, with the color sets also able to receive the old signals. [Electromagnetic Videos] tells the tale. The video below simulates various video artifacts, so you not only learn about the details of NTSC video, but also see some of the discussed effects in real time.

Creating a black-and-white signal was already a big deal, with the video and sync presented in an analog AM signal with the sound superimposed with FM. People had demonstrated color earlier, but it wasn’t practical for several reasons. Sending, for example, separate red, blue, and green signals would require wider channels and more complex receivers, and would be incompatible with older sets.

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Watch A Recording Lathe From 1958 Cut A Lacquer Master Record

December 13, 2025 by Donald Papp 14 Comments

Most of us are familiar with vinyl LPs, and even with the way in which they are made by stamping a hot puck of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) into a record. But [Technostalgism] takes us all the way back to the beginning, giving us a first-hand look at how a lacquer master is cut by a specialized recording lathe.

An uncut lacquer master is an aluminum base coated with a flawless layer of lacquer. It smells like fresh, drying paint.

Cutting a lacquer master is the intricate process by which lacquer disks, used as the masters for vinyl records, are created. These glossy black masters — still made by a company in Japan — are precision aluminum discs coated with a special lacquer to create a surface that resembles not-quite-cured nail polish and, reportedly, smells like fresh paint.

The cutting process itself remains largely unchanged over the decades, although the whole supporting setup is a bit more modernized than it would have been some seventy years ago. In the video (embedded below), we get a whole tour of the setup and watch a Neumann AM32B Master Stereo Disk Recording Lathe from 1958 cut the single unbroken groove that makes up the side of a record.

The actual cutting tool is a stylus whose movement combines the left and right channels and is heated to achieve the smoothest cuts possible. The result is something that impresses the heck out of [Technostalgism] with its cleanliness, clarity, and quality. Less obvious is the work that goes into arranging the whole thing. Every detail, every band between tracks, is the result of careful planning.

It’s very clear that not only is special equipment needed to cut a disk, but doing so effectively is a display of serious craftsmanship, experience, and skill. If you’re inclined to agree and are hungry for more details, then be sure to check out this DIY record-cutting lathe.
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Rats Get Even Better At Playing DOOM

December 12, 2025 by Ian Bos 27 Comments

We all know that you can play DOOM on nearly anything, but what about the lesser known work being done to let other species get in on the action? For ages now, our rodent friends haven’t been able to play the 1993 masterpiece, but [Viktor Tóth] and colleagues have been working hard to fix this unfortunate oversight.

If you’ve got the feeling this isn’t the first time you’ve read about rats attempting to slay demons, it’s probably because [Victor] has been working on this mission for years now — with a previous attempt succeeding in allowing rats to navigate the DOOM landscape. Getting the rodents to actually play through the game properly has proved slightly more difficult, however.

Improving on the previous attempt, V2 has the capability to allow rats to traverse through levels, be immersed in the virtual world with a panoramic screen, and take out enemies. Rewards are given to successful behaviors in the form of sugar water through a solenoid powered dispenser.

While this current system looks promising, the rats haven’t gotten too far though the game due to time constraints. But they’ve managed to travel through the levels and shoot, which is still pretty impressive for rodents.

DOOM has been an indicator of just how far we can take technology for decades. While this particular project has taken the meme into a slightly different direction, there are always surprises. You can even play DOOM in KiCad when you’re tired of using it to design PCBs.

USB Video Capture Devices: Wow! They’re All Bad!!

December 7, 2025 by Donald Papp 46 Comments

[VWestlife] purchased all kinds of USB video capture devices — many of them from the early 2000s — and put them through their paces in trying to digitize VHS classics like Instant Fireplace and Buying an Auxiliary Sailboat. The results were actually quite varied, but almost universally bad. They all worked, but they also brought unpleasant artifacts and side effects when it came to the final results. Sure, the analog source isn’t always the highest quality, but could it really be this hard to digitize a VHS tape?

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The box of the Busch Electronic Digital-Technik 2075

The Busch Electronic Digital-Technik 2075 Digital Lab From The 1970s

November 26, 2025 by John Elliot V 6 Comments

In a recent video, [Jason Jacques] demos the Busch Electronic Digital-Technik 2075 which was released in West Germany in the 1970s.

The Digital-Technik 2075 comes with a few components including a battery holder and 9 V battery, a push button, two 1 K resistors, a red LED, a 100 nF ceramic capacitor, a 100 µF electrolytic capacitor, a quad NAND gate IC, and a counter module which includes an IC and a 7-segment display. The kit also comes with wires, plugs, a breadboard, and a tool for extracting modules.

The Digital-Technik 2075 doesn’t use the spring terminals we see in other project labs of the time, such as the Science Fair kits from Radio Shack, and it doesn’t use modular Denshi blocks, such as we saw from the Gakken EX-150, but rather uses wire in conjunction with yellow plastic plugs. This seems to work well enough.

In the video, after showing us how to do switch debouncing, [Jason] runs us through making a counter with the digital components and then getting the counter to reset after it counts to five. This is done using NAND gates. Before he gets stuck into doing a project he takes a close look at the manual (which is in German) including some of the advertisements for other project labs from Busch which were available at the time. As he doesn’t speak German [Jason] prints out an English translation of the manual before working through it.

We’ve heard from [Jason] at Hackaday in recent history when we saw his Microtronic Phoenix Computer System which referenced the 2090 Microtronic Computer System which was also made by Busch.

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