A Minimal ESP8266 Digital Picture Frame

March 1, 2020 by Tom Nardi 2 Comments

Over the last few years, the price of a good digital picture frame has dropped to the point that we don’t often see DIY versions anymore. As much as we might hate to admit it, it’s hard to justify building something yourself when the economies of scale have made it so you can buy the final product for less than the cost of the parts themselves. But of course, there are always fringe cases where building it might be the only way to get what you need.

Granted we’re not sure that [Tony Liu] actually needs a 1.8-inch digital picture frame, but we’re sure somebody out there does. The ST7735R display used in this project is a real TFT, so the color and refresh rate is pretty good; but with a resolution of just 128×160, we’d recommend keeping your expectations low in regards to visual fidelity.

What’s really interesting about this project is how low the part count is. All you need is the ST7735R display and the ESP8266 itself (or the development board of your choice, naturally). Even the 3D printed frame is technically optional. The display is driven by SPI, so with the power added in, that’s only eight wires that need to be soldered between the two devices. If you’re looking for an easy way to add a photo slideshow to a small device, say a conference badge, this is about as easy as it gets.

But where are the images coming from? You might think SPIFFS, but in this case [Tony] has converted the images to bitmaps and is loading them into the Arduino Sketch as a header file with PROGMEM. Helpfully, he provides the link for the tool he uses to convert the images into an array the graphics library can understand. This makes adding new images slightly time consuming, but we imagine if you have the need for something like this, it’s probably only showing a pretty specific set of images anyway.

If you’re looking for something bigger, or maybe just an excuse to put that dusty Raspberry Pi to use, you might be interested in one of the more substantial builds we’ve seen over the years.

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Building Cameras For The Immersive Future

February 28, 2020 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

Thus far, the vast majority of human photographic output has been two-dimensional. 3D displays have come and gone in various forms over the years, but as technology progresses, we’re beginning to see more and more immersive display technologies. Of course, to use these displays requires content, and capturing that content in three dimensions requires special tools and techniques. Kim Pimmel came down to Hackaday Superconference to give us a talk on the current state of the art in advanced AR and VR camera technologies.

[Kim]’s interest in light painting techniques explored volumetric as well as 2D concepts.

Kim has plenty of experience with advanced displays, with an impressive resume in the field. Having worked on Microsoft’s Holo Lens, he now leads Adobe’s Aero project, an AR app aimed at creatives. Kim’s journey began at a young age, first experimenting with his family’s Yashica 35mm camera, where he discovered a love for capturing images. Over the years, he experimented with a wide variety of gear, receiving a Canon DSLR from his wife as a gift, and later tinkering with the Stereorealist 35mm 3D camera. The latter led to Kim’s growing obsession with three-dimensional capture techniques.

Through his work in the field of AR and VR displays, Kim became familiar with the combination of the Ricoh Theta S 360 degree camera and the Oculus Rift headset. This allowed users to essentially sit inside a photo sphere, and see the image around them in three dimensions. While this was compelling, [Kim] noted that a lot of 360 degree content has issues with framing. There’s no way to guide the observer towards the part of the image you want them to see.

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OpenAstroTracker Turns Your DSLR Into An Astronomy Instrument

February 25, 2020 by Al Williams 30 Comments

If you want to take beautiful night sky pictures with your DSLR and you live between 15 degrees and 55 degrees north latitude you might want to check out OpenAstroTracker. If you have a 3D printer it will probably take about 60 hours of printing, but you’ll wind up with a pretty impressive setup for your camera. There’s an Arduino managing the tracking and also providing a “go to” capability.

The design is over on Thingiverse and you can find code on GitHub. There’s also a Reddit dedicated to the project. The tracker touts its ability to handle long or heavy lenses and to target 180 degrees in every direction.

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Bluetooth Intervalometer Makes Time Lapses Easy

February 21, 2020 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

Taking timelapses is a fun pastime of many a photographer. While most modern cameras have some features to pull this off, if you want to get really into it, you’ll want an intervalometer to run the show. Chasing just that, [Zach] decided that rather than buying off-the-shelf, a DIY build was in order.

The build relies on an Arduino Nano to run the show, in combination with the popular HC-05 Bluetooth module. The Bluetooth module allows the device to communicate with a smartphone app which [Zach] created using RoboRemo. This is a platform that makes creating custom USB, WiFI and Bluetooth apps easy for beginners. The app sends instructions to the intervalometer regarding the number of photos to take, and the time to wait between each shot. Then, it triggers the time lapse, and the Arduino triggers the camera by shorting the relevant pins on a TRS plug inserted into the camera.

It’s a straightforward build that most hackers could probably complete with parts from the junk box. Plus, building your own offers the possibility of customising it exactly to your needs. Of course, you can eschew modernity and do things mechanically instead. Video after the break.

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A Cheap And Easy GoPro Mount For Model Rocketry

February 16, 2020 by Lewin Day No comments

Launching model rockets is fun, but the real meat of the hobby lies in what you do next. Some choose to instrument their rockets or carry other advanced payloads. [seamster] likes to film his flights, and built a nosecone camera package to do so.

A GoPro is the camera of choice for [seamster]’s missions, with its action cam design making it easy to fire off with a single press of a button. To mount it on the rocket, the nosecone was designed in several sections. The top and bottom pieces are 3D printed, which are matched with a clear plastic cylinder cut from a soda bottle. Inside the cylinder, the GoPro and altimeter hardware are held in place with foam blocks, cut to shape from old floor mats. The rocket’s parachute is attached to the top of the nose cone, which allows the camera to hang in the correct orientation on both the ascent and descent phases of the flight. Check out the high-flying videos created with this setup after the break.

It’s a simple design that [seamster] was able to whip up in Tinkercad in just a few hours, and one that’s easily replicable by the average maker at home. Getting your feet wet with filming your flights has never been easier – we’ve certainly come a long way from shooting on film in the 1970s.

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See In The Dark, The Simple Way

February 9, 2020 by Jenny List 42 Comments

Night vision googles used to be the exclusive preserve of the military, and then of the well-heeled. Image intensifier tubes were very expensive, and needed high-voltage power supplies to keep them going. Now that we have solid-state infra-red cameras the task of seeing in the dark had become much simpler, and [Alex Zidros] is here to show us just how easy that can be. His night vision goggles take a selection of off-the-shelf parts and a little bit of 3D printing to produce a complete set-up for a fraction of the cost of those night-vision goggles of old.

At its heart is a little NTSC/PAL LCD display in a 3D printed bracket. These used to be a small display of choice, but we see them rarely now because standalone displays and the microcontrollers to drive them have become so much more useful. Driving the display is a video camera with its IR filter removed, and providing illumination is an IR flashlight. In effect it’s a classic analogue CCTV system in miniature, but the most important thing is that it works.

We might have expected a Raspberry Pi Zero and NoIR camera, but it’s difficult to argue with a functioning night vision system. If you want to look at a project with an image intensifier tube though, we’ve covered one of those in the past.

3D Printed GIFs For Stop Motion Memes

February 5, 2020 by Tom Nardi 17 Comments

Lithophanes are nothing new, with examples going back to the 1800s. But they’ve become popular again thanks to the ease of which these pieces of artwork can be 3D printed. While the Internet would be more than happy to see somebody press a 3D image of their cat into a thin piece of translucent porcelain ready to have a light shone through it, that’s quite a bit harder than just firing up the Monoprice.

But since the machine is doing all the work for you, why stop at one? That’s precisely the sort of thinking that lead [The Mad Maker] to recreate animated GIFs with stop motion photography and a stack of printed lithophanes. Now all your favorite reaction memes can make the leap to the physical world…and then go right back into the computer.

The method here is pretty simple: [The Mad Maker] disassembles his favorite GIF to get the individual frame images, converts each one of those into a lithophane STL via an online tool, prints it out, photographs it, and then stitches all those photographs back into a new GIF. Given the incredibly time consuming nature of this process you’ll want to limit it to short animations, and even then, probably do only every 2nd or 3rd frame to preserve your sanity.

In the video after the break you can see the entire process, as well as check out the final result. While there weren’t really any technical hurdles to overcome in this project, we did like seeing how [The Mad Maker] experimented to find the ideal position for the backlight and camera. The wooden frame he came up with to hold everything in position should make subsequent meme conversions a lot easier, now he just needs to add a little color. Continue reading “3D Printed GIFs For Stop Motion Memes” →