Repairing A Kodak Picture Maker Kiosk

Photo-printing kiosks are about as common as payphones these days. However, there was a time when they were everywhere. The idea was that if you didn’t have a good printer at home, you could take your digital files to a kiosk, pay your money, and run off some high-quality images. [Snappiness] snagged one, and if you’ve ever wondered what was inside of one, here’s your chance.

While later models used a Windows PC inside, this one is old enough to have a Sun computer. That also means that it had things like PCMCIA slots and a film scanner. Unfortunately, it wasn’t working because of a bad touch screen. The box was looking for a network on boot, which required some parameter changes. The onboard battery is dead, too, so you have to change the parameters on every boot. However, the real killer was the touchscreen, which the software insists on finding before it will start.

The monitor is an old device branded as a Kodak monitor and, of course, is unavailable. [Snappiness] found pictures of another kiosk online and noted that the monitor was from Elo, a common provider of point-of-sale screens. Could the “Kodak” monitor just be an Elo with a new badge? It turns out it probably was because a new Elo monitor did the trick.

Of course, what excited us was that if we found one of these in a scrap pile, it might have a Sun workstation inside. Of course, you can just boot Solaris on your virtual PC today. You might be surprised that Kodak invented the digital camera. But they failed to understand what it would mean to the future of photography.

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Make Your Cheap Thermal Camera Into A Microscope

[Project 326] has a cheap thermal camera that plugs into a smart phone. Sure they are handy, but what if you could hack one into a microscope with a resolution measured in microns? It is easier than you might think and you can see how in the video below.

Of course, microscopes need lenses, but glass doesn’t usually pass IR very well. This calls for lenses made of exotic material like germanium. One germanium lens gives some magnification. However, using a 3D printed holder, three lenses are in play, and the results are impressive.

The resolution is good enough to see the turns of wire in an incandescent light bulb. A decapsulated power transistor was interesting to view, too. Imaging heat at that much resolution gives you a lot of information. At the end, he teases that using first surface mirrors, he may show how to build an IR telescope as well.

Presumably, this will work with just about any IR camera if you adapt the lens holder. The unit in the video is a UNI-T UTi-260M. So when he says he spent about $35 on the build, that’s not including the $400 or so camera module.

IR imaging can pull off some amazing tricks, like looking inside an IC. If the thermal camera used in the video isn’t to your liking, there are plenty of others out there.

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Expensive Camera, Cheap 3D-Printed Lens

If you’re a photography enthusiast, you probably own quite a few cameras, but the chances are your “good” one will have interchangeable lenses. Once you’ve exhausted the possibilities of the kit lens, you can try different focal lengths and effects, but you’ll soon find out that good glass isn’t cheap. Can you solve this problem by making your own lenses? [Billt] has done just that.

Given some CAD skills, it’s possible to replicate the mount on an existing lens, but he takes a shortcut by using a readily available camera cap project. There are two lenses detailed in the video below the break; the first is a plastic lens from a disposable camera, while the second takes one from a Holga toy camera. The plastic lens is inserted mid-print, giving the colour aberrations and soft focus you’d expect, while the Holga lens is mounted on a slide for focusing. There may be some room for improvement there, but the result is a pair of fun lenses for experimentation for not much outlay. Given the number of broken older cameras out there, it should be relatively easy for anyone wanting to try this for themselves to have a go.

The video is below the break, but while you’re on this path, take a look at a previous project using disposable camera lenses. Or, consider printing an entire camera.

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Ptychography For High Resolution Microscopy

Nowadays, if you have a microscope, you probably have a camera of some sort attached. [Applied Science] shows how you can add an array of tiny LEDs and some compute power to produce high-resolution images — higher than you can get with the microscope on its own. The idea is to illuminate each LED in the array individually and take a picture. Then, an algorithm constructs a higher-resolution image from the collected images. You can see the results and an explanation in the video below.

You’d think you could use this to enhance a cheap microscope, but the truth is you need a high-quality microscope to start with. In addition, color cameras may not be usable, so you may have to find or create a monochrome camera.

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New Camera Does Realtime Holographic Capture, No Coherent Light Required

Holography is about capturing 3D data from a scene, and being able to reconstruct that scene — preferably in high fidelity. Holography is not a new idea, but engaging in it is not exactly a point-and-shoot affair. One needs coherent light for a start, and it generally only gets touchier from there. But now researchers describe a new kind of holographic camera that can capture a scene better and faster than ever. How much better? The camera goes from scene capture to reconstructed output in under 30 milliseconds, and does it using plain old incoherent light.

The camera and liquid lens is tiny. Together with the computation back end, they can make a holographic capture of a scene in under 30 milliseconds.

The new camera is a two-part affair: acquisition, and calculation. Acquisition consists of a camera with a custom electrically-driven liquid lens design that captures a focal stack of a scene within 15 ms. The back end is a deep learning neural network system (FS-Net) which accepts the camera data and computes a high-fidelity RGB hologram of the scene in about 13 ms.  How good are the results? They beat other methods, and reconstruction of the scene using the data looks really, really good.

One might wonder what makes this different from, say, a 3D scene captured by a stereoscopic camera, or with an RGB depth camera (like the now-discontinued Intel RealSense). Those methods capture 2D imagery from a single perspective, combined with depth data to give an understanding of a scene’s physical layout.

Holography by contrast captures a scene’s wavefront information, which is to say it captures not just where light is coming from, but how it bends and interferes. This information can be used to optically reconstruct a scene in a way data from other sources cannot; for example allowing one to shift perspective and focus.

Being able to capture holographic data in such a way significantly lowers the bar for development and experimentation in holography — something that’s traditionally been tricky to pull off for the home gamer.

DIY Open-Source Star Tracker Gets You Those Great Night Shots

What does one do when frustrated at the lack of affordable, open source portable trackers? If you’re [OG-star-tech], you design your own and give it modular features that rival commercial offerings while you’re at it.

What’s a star tracker? It’s a method of determining position based on visible stars, but when it comes to astrophotography the term refers to a sort of hardware-assisted camera holder that helps one capture stable long-exposure images. This is done by moving the camera in such a way as to cancel out the effects of the Earth’s rotation. The result is long-exposure photographs without the stars smearing themselves across the image.

Interested? Learn more about the design by casting an eye over the bill of materials at the GitHub repository, browsing the 3D-printable parts, and maybe check out the assembly guide. If you like what you see, [OG-star-tech] says you should be able to build your own very affordably if you don’t mind 3D printing parts in ASA or ABS. Prefer to buy a kit or an assembled unit? [OG-star-tech] offers them for sale.

Frustration with commercial offerings (or lack thereof) is a powerful motive to design something or contribute to an existing project, and if it leads to more people enjoying taking photos of the night sky and all the wonderful things in it, so much the better.

Custom Frame Grabber Gets Vintage Kodak Digital Camera Back In The Game

What do you do with a four-megapixel monochrome digital camera from the 90s that needed a dedicated PC with a frame grabber card to do anything useful? Easy — you turn it into a point-and-shoot by building your own frame grabber.

At least that’s what [Frost Sheridan] did with a vintage Kodak MegaPlus 4.2i, a camera that was aimed at the industrial and scientific market at a time when everyone was still using film for snapshots. Making this workhorse ride again meant diving into the manual, luckily still available after all these years, and figuring out what pins on the 68 pin connector would be useful. [Frost] worked out the pins for serial commands plus the 10-bit parallel interface, although he settled for the eight most significant bits to make things simpler. A Teensy with some extra RAM and a serial interface chip takes care of sending commands to the camera and pulling pixels off the parallel interface, and a 128×160 LCD provides a much-needed viewfinder.

With a battery pack mounted the whole thing is reasonably portable, if a bit of a chore to use. It’s worth the effort, though; the picture quality is fantastic, with a wide dynamic range and plenty of contrast. Hats off to [Frost] for bringing this beauty back to life without making any permanent modifications to it.