Better Macro Images With Arduino Focus Stacking

January 26, 2023 by Al Williams 17 Comments

If you’ve ever played around with macro photography, you’ve likely noticed that the higher the lens magnification, the less the depth of field. One way around this issue is to take several slices at different focus points, and then stitch the photos together digitally. As [Curious Scientist] demonstrates, this is a relatively simple motion control project and well within the reach of a garden-variety Arduino.

You can move the camera or move the subject. Either way, you really only need one axis of motion, which makes it quite simple. This build relies on a solid-looking lead screw to move a carriage up or down. An Arduino Nano acts as the brains, a stepper motor drives the lead screw, and a small display shows stats such as current progress and total distance to move.

The stepper motor uses a conventional stepper driver “stick” as you find in many 3D printers. In fact, we wondered if you couldn’t just grab a 3D printer board and modify it for this service without spinning a custom PCB. Fittingly, the example subject is another Arduino Nano. Skip ahead to 32:22 in the video below to see the final result.

We’ve seen similar projects, of course. You can build for tiny subjects. You can also adapt an existing motion control device like a CNC machine.

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A red and blue Lytro camera with a serial port soldered onto one

Unlocking Hidden Features Of An Unusual Camera

January 25, 2023 by Robin Kearey 65 Comments

Back in 2012, technology websites were abuzz with news of the Lytro: a camera that was going to revolutionize photography thanks to its innovative light field technology. An array of microlenses in front of the sensor let it capture a 3D image of a scene from one point, allowing the user to extract depth information and to change the focus of an image even after capturing it.

The technology turned out to be a commercial failure however, and the company faded into obscurity. Lytro cameras can now be had for as little as $20 on the second-hand market, as [ea] found out when he started to investigate light field photography. They still work just as well as they ever did, but since the accompanying PC software is now definitely starting to show its age, [ea] decided to reverse-engineer the camera’s firmware so he could write his own application.

[ea] started by examining the camera’s hardware. The main CPU turned out to be a MIPS processor similar to those used in various cheap camera gadgets, next to what looked like an unpopulated socket for a serial port and a set of JTAG test points. The serial port was sending out a bootup sequence and a command prompt, but didn’t seem to respond to any inputs. Continue reading “Unlocking Hidden Features Of An Unusual Camera” →

Floppy Photog: Making An IR Filter From A 3.5″ Disk

January 21, 2023 by Al Williams 15 Comments

Sony used to sell digital cameras that recorded on actual floppy disks. We’ve come a long way, but [Mathieu] put a floppy in a digital camera recently for an entirely different reason. First, though, he had to modify the camera to work on the full spectrum, something he covered in an earlier video. You can see both videos, below.

As you might expect, he didn’t actually put an entire floppy inside the camera. He used the internal disk portion as an infrared filter to obtain some striking photos. In all honestly, the results were not as nice as what you get from a very expensive professional filter. But the pictures looked great and the difference was not as much as you’d expect compared to the cost difference.

The real work, though, is converting the camera to full spectrum as seen in the second video. A normal camera has an IR filter to prevent the sensor from seeing IR light. This prevents the image sensor from capturing things your eyes don’t see. The modification replaces the filter with a clear filter.

We’ve covered this kind of conversion before. You can even do it with a Raspberry Pi, if you like.

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Weatherproof Raspberry Pi Camera Enclosure, In A Pinch

January 18, 2023 by Donald Papp 17 Comments

The Raspberry Pi is the foundation of many IoT camera projects, but enclosures are often something left up to the user. [Mare] found that a serviceable outdoor enclosure could be made with a trip to the hardware store and inexpensive microscopy supplies.

A suitably-sized plastic junction box is a good starting point, but it takes more than that to make a functional enclosure.

The main component of the enclosure is a small plastic junction box, but it takes more than a box to make a functional outdoor enclosure. First of all, cable should be run into the box with the help of a cable fitting, and this fitting should be pointed toward the ground when the enclosure is mounted. This helps any moisture drip away with gravity, instead of pooling inconveniently.

All wire connections should be kept inside the enclosure, but if that’s not possible, we have seen outdoor-sealed wire junctions with the help of some 3D-printing and silicone sealant. That may help if cable splices are unavoidable.

The other main design concern is providing a window through which the camera can see. [Mare] found that the small Raspberry Pi camera board can be accommodated by drilling a hole into the side of the box, cleaning up the edges, and securing a cover slip (or clover glass) to the outside with an adhesive. Cover slips are extremely thin pieces of glass used to make microscope slides; ridiculously cheap, and probably already in a citizen scientist’s parts bin. They are also fragile, but if the device doesn’t expect a lot of stress it will do the job nicely.

[Mare] uses the Raspberry Pi and camera as part of Telraam, an open-source project providing a fully-automated traffic counting service that keeps anonymized counts of vehicle, pedestrian, and bicycle activity. Usually such a device is mounted indoors and aimed at a window, but this enclosure method is an option should one need to mount a camera outdoors. There’s good value in using a Raspberry Pi as a DIY security camera, after all.

Photography, The Stereo Way

December 19, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 19 Comments

Most consumer-grade audio equipment has been in stereo since at least the 1960s, allowing the listener to experience sounds with a three-dimensional perspective as if they were present when the sound was originally made. Stereo photography has lagged a little behind the stereo audio trend, though, with most of the technology existing as passing fads or requiring clumsy hardware to experience fully. Not so with the DIY stereoscopic cameras like this one produced by this group of 3D photography enthusiasts, who have also some methods to view the photos in 3D without any extra hardware.

The camera uses two imaging sensors to produce a stereo image. One sensor is fixed, and the other is on a slider which allows the user to adjust the “amount” of 3D effect needed for any particular photo. [Jim] is using this camera mostly for macro photography, which means that he only needs a few millimeters of separation between the two sensors to achieve the desired effect, but for more distant objects more separation can be used. The camera uses dual Raspberry Pi processors, a lithium battery, and a touch screen interface. It includes a ton of features as well including things like focus stacking, but to get a more full experience of this build we’d highly recommend checking out the video after the break.

As for viewing the photographs, these stereoscopic 3D images require nothing more than a little practice to view them. This guide is available with some simple examples to get started, and while it does at first feel like a Magic Eye puzzle from the late 90s, it quickly becomes intuitive. Another guide has some more intricate 3D maps at the end to practice on as well. This is quite the step up from needing to use special glasses or a wearable 3D viewer of some sort. There are also some methods available to create 3D images from those taken with a regular 2D camera as well.

Thanks to [Bill] for the tip and the additional links to the guides for viewing these images!

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Interesting Optical Journey Results In Hybrid Viewfinder For Smartphones

December 12, 2022 by Dan Maloney 5 Comments

Fair warning: if you ever thought there was nothing particularly interesting with optical viewfinders, prepare to have your misconception corrected by [volzo] with this deep-dive into camera-aiming aids that leads to an interesting hybrid smartphone viewfinder.

For most of us, the traditional optical viewfinder is very much a thing of the past, having been supplanted by digital cameras and LCD displays. But some people still want to frame a photograph the old-fashioned way, and the optical principles that make that possible are actually a lot more complicated than they seem. [volzo]’s blog post and video go into a great deal of detail on viewfinder optics, so feel free to fall down that rabbit hole — it’s worth the trip. But if you’d rather cut to the chase, the actual viewfinder build starts at about the 23:00 mark in the video.

The design is an interesting combination of lenses and beamsplitters that live in a 3D-printed enclosure. The whole thing slips over one end of a smartphone and combines an optical view of the scene that corresponds to the camera’s field of view with a small digital overlay from the phone’s screen. The overlay is quite simple: just some framing gridlines and a tilt indicator that’s generated by a little Android app. But it’s clear that much more information could be added now that [volzo] has all the optical issues sorted out.

We appreciate this deep dive into something that appears to be mundane and outdated, which actually proves to be non-obvious and pretty interesting. And if you have any doubt about the extreme cleverness of the camera engineers of yore, look no further than this sort-of solar-powered camera from the 1960s.

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Rocket Mounted 3D Printed Camera Wheel Tries, Succeeds, And Also Fails

December 6, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 29 Comments

[Joe] at BPS.space has a thing for rockets, and his latest quest is to build a rocket that will cross the Kármán Line and launch into the Final Frontier. And being the owner of a YouTube channel, he wants to have excellent on-board video that he can share. The trouble? Spinning. A spinning rocket is a stable rocket, especially as altitude increases. So how would [Joe] get stable video from a rocket spinning at several hundred degrees per second? That’s the question being addressed in the video below the break.

Rather than use processing power to stabilize video digitally, [Joe] decided to take a different approach: Cancelling out the spin with a motor, essentially making a camera-wielding reaction wheel that would stay oriented in one direction, no matter how fast the rocket itself is spinning.

Did it work? Yes… and no. The design was intended to be a proof of concept, and in that sense there was a lot of success and some excellent video was taken. But as with many proof of concept prototypes, the spinning camera module has a lot of room for improvement. [Joe] goes into some details about the changes he’ll be making for revision 2, including a different motor and some software improvements. We certainly look forward to seeing the progress!

To get a better idea of the problem that [Joe] is trying to solve, check out this 360 degree rocket cam that we featured a few years ago.

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