digital cameras hacks

985 Articles

Attach A Full Size Lens To A Tiny Camera

December 19, 2025 by 7 Comments

The Kodak Charmera is a tiny keychain camera produced by licencing out the name of the famous film manufacturer, and it’s the current must-have cool trinket among photo nerds. Inside is a tiny sensor and a fixed-focus M7 lens, and unlike many toy cameras it has better quality than its tiny package might lead you to expect. There will always be those who wish to push the envelope though, and [微攝 Macrodeon] is here to fit a lens mount for full-size lenses (Chinese language, subtitle translation available).

The hack involves cracking the camera open and separating the lens mount from the sensor. This is something we’re familiar with from other cameras, and it’s a fiddly process which requires a lot of care. A C-mount is then glued to the front, from which all manner of other lenses can be attached using a range of adapters. The focus requires a bit of effort to set up and we’re guessing that every lens becomes extreme telephoto due to the tiny sensor, but we’re sure hours of fun could be had.

The Charmera is almost constantly sold out, but you should be able to place a preorder for about $30 USD if you want one. If waiting months for delivery isn’t your bag, there are other cameras you can upgrade to C-mount.

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Tearing Down Walmart’s $12 Keychain Camera

December 15, 2025 by 45 Comments

Keychain cameras are rarely good. However, in the case of Walmart’s current offering, it might be worse than it’s supposed to be. [FoxTailWhipz] bought the Vivitar-branded device and set about investigating its claim that it could deliver high-resolution photos.

The Vivatar Retro Keychain Camera costs $12.88, and wears “FULL HD” and “14MP” branding on the packaging. It’s actually built by Sakar International, a company that manufactures products for other brands to license. Outside of the branding, though, [FoxTailWhipz] figured the resolution claims were likely misleading. Taking photos quickly showed this was the case, as whatever setting was used, the photos would always come out at 640 x 480, or roughly 0.3 megapixels. He thus decided a teardown would be the best way to determine what was going on inside. You can see it all in the video below.

Pulling the device apart was easy, revealing that the screen and battery are simply attached to the PCB with double-sided tape. With the board removed from the case, the sensor and lens module are visible, with the model number printed on the flex cable. The sensor datasheet tells you what you need to know. It’s a 2-megapixel sensor, capable of resolutions up to 1632 x 1212. The camera firmware itself seems to not even use the full resolution, since it only outputs images at 640 x 480.

It’s not that surprising that an ultra-cheap keychain camera doesn’t meet the outrageous specs on the box. At the same time, it’s sad to see major retailers selling products that can’t do what they say on the tin. We see this problem a lot, in everything from network cables to oscilloscopes.

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Hidden Camera Build Proves You Can’t Trust Walnuts

December 12, 2025 by 10 Comments

Typically, if you happened across a walnut lying about, you might consider eating it or throwing it to a friendly squirrel. However, as [Penguin DIY] demonstrates, it’s perfectly possible to turn the humble nut into a clandestine surveillance device. It turns out the walnut worriers were right all along.

The build starts by splitting and hollowing out the walnut. From there, small holes are machined into the mating faces of the walnut, into which [Penguin DIY] glues small neodymium magnets. These allow the walnut to be opened and snapped shut as desired, while remaining indistinguishable from a regular walnut at a distance.

The walnut shell is loaded with nine tiny lithium-polymer cells, for a total of 270 mAh of battery capacity at 3.7 volts. Charging the cells is achieved via a deadbugged TP4056 charge module to save space, with power supplied via a USB C port. Holes are machined in the walnut shell for the USB C port as well as the camera lens, though one imagines the former could have been hidden purely inside for a stealthier look. The camera itself appears to be an all-in-one module with a transmitter built in, with the antenna installed in the top half of the walnut shell and connected via pogo pins. The video signal can be picked up at a distance via a receiver hooked up to a smart phone. No word on longevity, but the included batteries would probably provide an hour or two of transmission over short ranges if you’re lucky.

If you have a walnut tree in your backyard, please do not email us about your conspiracy theories that they are watching you. We get those more than you might think, and they are always upsetting to read. If, however, you’re interested in surveillance devices, we’ve featured projects built for detecting them before with varying levels of success. Video after the break.

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Instant Sketch Camera Is Like A Polaroid That Draws

November 28, 2025 by 19 Comments

These days, everyone’s got a million different devices that can take a passable photo. That’s not special anymore. A camera that draws what it sees, though? That’s kind of fun. That’s precisely what [Jens] has built—an instant sketch camera!

The sketch camera looks like a miniature drawing easel, holding a rectangular slip of paper not dissimilar in size to the Polaroid film of old. The 3D-printed frame rocks a Raspberry Pi controlling a simple pen plotter, using SG90 servos to position the drawing implement and trace out a drawing. So far, so simple. The real magic is in the image processing, which takes any old photo with the Pi camera and turns it into a sketch in the first place. This is achieved with the OpenCV image processing library, using an edge detection algorithm along with some additional filtering to do the job.

If you’ve ever wanted to take Polaroids that looked like sketches when you’re out on the go, this is a great way to do it. We’ve featured some other great plotter builds before, too, just few that are as compact and portable as this one. Video after the break.

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Small camera with greyscale image

Camera Capabilities Unlocked From A Mouse

November 8, 2025 by 21 Comments

There is a point where taking technology for granted hides some of the incredible capabilities of seemingly simple devices. Optical mice are a great example of this principle, using what are more or less entirely self-contained cameras just for moving the cursor across your screen. Don’t believe us? Check out this camera made from an old optical mouse from [Dycus]!

For those unfamiliar with optical mice, the sensor used for tracking movement, like a camera, is just an array of photosensitive sensors. This allows a simple on-board microcontroller to convert the small changes from the visual sensor into acceleration/movement information to be sent to the computer.

Proving how capable these sensors can truly be, [Dycus]’s camera manages a whole 30×30 array of picture quality. Along with glorious greyscale, the pictures achieved from such a camera are more than recognizable. Putting together the camera didn’t even require anything crazy beyond the sensor itself. What appears to be a Teensy LC board, basic buttons, and a small screen are essentially everything required to replicate the camera’s functionality. Pictures, both standard and “panoramic”, can be viewed in a variety of color palettes stored on board. Along with a surprisingly impressive feature set, the idea is impressive.

Limitations are often the mother of innovation, no matter if self-imposed or not, as seen here. However, [Dycus] still had a whole 30×30 array to photograph. What about a single pixel? Let’s make it even harder; we can’t look directly at the subject! This is exactly what was done here in this impressive demonstration of clever engineering.

Thanks to JohnU and Thinkerer for the tip!

Medium Format, 3 GigaPixel Camera Puts It All On The Line (Sensor)

November 7, 2025 by 18 Comments

It’s a bit of a truism that bigger sensors lead to better pictures when it comes to photography. Of course everyone who isn’t a photographer knows that moar megapixles is moar better. So, when [Gigawipf], aka [Yannick Richter] wanted to make a camera, he knew he had to go big or go home. So big he went: a medium format camera with a whopping 3.2 gigapixel resolution.

Now, getting a hold of a sensor like that is not easy, and [Yannick] didn’t even try. The hack starts by tearing down a couple of recent-model Kodak scanners from eBay to get at those sweet CCD line sensors. Yes, this is that classic hack: the scanner camera. Then it’s off to the oscilloscope and the datasheet for some serious reverse-engineering to figure out how to talk to these things. Protocol analysis starts about 4 minutes in of the embedded video, and is worth watching even if you have no interest in photography.

As for what the line sensor will be talking to, why, it’s nothing other than a Rasberry Pi 5, interfacing through a custom PCB that also holds the stepper driver. Remember this is a line sensor camera: the sensor needs to be scanned across the image plane inside the camera, line by line, just as it is in the scanner. He’s using off-the-shelf linear rails to do that job. Technically we suppose you could use a mirror to optically scan the image across a fixed sensor, but scanner cameras have traditionally done it this way and [Yannick] is keeping with tradition. Why not? It works.

Since these images are going to be huge an SD card in the Pi doesn’t cut it, so this is perhaps the only camera out there with an NVMe SSD. The raw data would be 19 GB per image, and though he’s post-processing on the fly to PNG they’re still big pictures.  There probably aren’t too many cameras sporting 8″ touchscreens out there, either, but since the back of the thing is so large, why not? There’s still a CSI camera inside, too, but in this case it’s being used as a digital viewfinder. (Most of us would have made that the camera.) The scanner cam is, of course, far too slow to generate its own previews. The preview camera actually goes onto the same 3D-printed mount as the line sensor, putting it onto the same focal plane as the sensor. Yes, the real-time previews are used to focus the camera.

In many ways, this is the nicest scanner camera we’ve ever featured, but that’s perhaps to be expected: there have been a lot of innovations to facilitate this build since scanner cams were common. Even the 3D printed and aluminum case is professional looking. Of course a big sensor needs a big lens, and after deciding projector lenses weren’t going to cut it, [Yannick] sprung for Pentax 6×7 system lenses, which are made for medium format cameras like this one. Well, not exactly like this one– these lenses were first made for film cameras in the 60s. Still, they offer a huge image, high-quality optics, and manual focus and aperture controls in a format that was easy to 3D-print a mount for.

Is it the most practical camera? Maybe not. Is it an impressive hack? Yes. We’ve always had a soft-spot for scanner cameras, and a in a recent double-ccd camera hack, we were lamenting in the comments that nobody was doing it anymore. So we’re very grateful to [Manawyrm] for sending in the tip.

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Pi-Powered Camera Turns Heads And Lenses In Equal Measure

November 7, 2025 by 11 Comments

Have you ever seen photos of retro movie sets where the cameras seem to be bedazzled with lenses? Of course you can only film via one lens at a time, but mounting multiple lenses on a turret as was done in those days has certain advantages –particularly when working with tiny M12 lenses, like our own [Jenny List] recently did with this three-lens, Pi-zero based camera.

Given that it’s [Jenny], the hardware is truly open source, with not just the Python code to drive the Pi but the OpenSCAD code used to generate the STLs for the turret and the camera body all available via GitHub under a generous CC-BY-SA-4.0 license. Even using a cheap sensor and lenses from AliExpress, [Jenny] gets good results, as you can see from the demo video embedded below. (Jump to 1:20 if you just want to see images from the camera.)

The lenses are mounted to a 3D printed ring with detents to lock each quickly in place, held in place by a self-tapping screw, proving we at Hackaday practice what we preach. (Or that [Jenny] does, at least when it comes to fasteners.) Swapping lenses becomes a moment’s twist, as opposed to fiddling with tiny lenses hoping you don’t drop one. We imagine the same convenience is what drove turret cameras to be used in the movie industry, once upon a time.

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