Pipes, Tees, And Gears Result In Smooth Video Shots

February 13, 2018 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

It’s depressingly easy to make bad videos, but it only takes a little care to turn that around. After ample lighting and decent audio — and not shooting in portrait — perhaps the biggest improvements come from stabilizing the camera while it’s moving. Giving your viewers motion sickness is bad form, after all, and to smooth out those beauty shots, a camera slider can be a big help.

Not all camera sliders are built alike, though, and we must admit to being baffled while first watching [Rulof Maker]’s build of a smooth, synchronized pan and slide camera rig. We just couldn’t figure out how those gears were going to be put to use, but as the video below progresses, it becomes clear that this is an adjustable pantograph rig, and that [Rulof]’s eBay gears are intended to link the two sets of pantograph arms together. The arms are formed from threaded pipe and tee fittings with bearings pressed into them, which is a pretty clever construction technique that seems highly dependent on having the good fortune to find bearings with an interference fit into the threads. But still, [Rulof] makes it work, and with a little epoxy and a fair amount of finagling, he ends up with a complex linkage that yields the desired effects. And bonus points for being able to configure the motion with small adjustments to the camera bracket pivot points.

We saw a similar pantograph slider a few months back. That one was 3D-printed and linked with timing belts, but the principles are the same and the shots from both look great.

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Plastic Model Emulates The First Untethered Spacewalk

February 11, 2018 by Donald Papp 18 Comments

Here’s something really wonderful. [Dave Akerman] wrote up the results of his attempt to use a high-altitude balloon to try to re-create a famous image of NASA’s Bruce McCandless floating freely in space with the Earth in the background. [Dave] did this in celebration of the 34th anniversary of the first untethered spacewalk, even going so far as to launch on the same day as the original event in 1984. He had excellent results, with plenty of video and images recorded by his payload.

Adhering to the actual day of the spacewalk wasn’t the only hurdle [Dave] jumped to make this happen. He tracked down an old and rare “Astronaut with MMU” (Mobile Maneuvering Unit) plastic model kit made by Revell USA and proceeded to build it and arrange for it to remain in view of the cameras. Raspberry Pi Zero Ws with cameras, LoRA hardware, action cameras, and a UBlox GPS unit all make an appearance in the balloon’s payload.

Sadly, [Bruce McCandless] passed away in late 2017, but this project is a wonderful reminder of that first untethered spacewalk. Details on the build and the payload, as well as the tracking system, are covered here on [Dave]’s blog. Videos of the launch and the inevitable balloon burst are embedded below, but more is available in the summary write-up.

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Neural Network Zaps You To Take Better Photographs

February 9, 2018 by Dan Maloney 38 Comments

It’s ridiculously easy to take a bad photograph. Your brain is a far better Photoshop than Photoshop, and the amount of editing it does on the scenes your eyes capture often results in marked and disappointing differences between what you saw and what you shot.

Taking your brain out of the photography loop is the goal of [Peter Buczkowski]’s “prosthetic photographer.” The idea is to use a neural network to constantly analyze a scene until maximal aesthetic value is achieved, at which point the user unconsciously takes the photograph.

But the human-computer interface is the interesting bit — the device uses a transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulator (TENS) wired to electrodes in the handgrip to involuntarily contract the user’s finger muscles and squeeze the trigger. (Editor’s Note: This project is about as sci-fi as it gets — the computer brain is pulling the strings of the meat puppet. Whoah.)

Meanwhile, back in reality, it’s not too strange a project. A Raspberry Pi watches the scene through a Pi Cam and uses a TensorFlow neural net trained against a set of high-quality photos to determine when to trip the shutter. The video below shows it in action, and [Peter]’s blog has some of the photos taken with it.

We’re not sure this is exactly the next “must have” camera accessory, and it probably won’t help with snapshots and selfies, but it’s an interesting take on the human-device interface. And if you’re thinking about the possibilities of a neural net inside your camera to prompt you when to take a picture, you might want to check out our primer on TensorFlow to get started.

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Large Format… Videography?

February 8, 2018 by Jenny List 41 Comments

Large format photography gives a special quality to the images it produces, due to the differences in depth of field and resolution between it and its more modern handheld equivalents. Projecting an image the size of a dinner plate rather than a postage stamp has a few drawbacks though when it comes to digital photography, sensor manufacturersdo not manufacture consumer products at that size.

[Zev Hoover] has created a large format digital camera, and is using it not only for still images but for video. And it’s an interesting device, for the way he’s translated a huge large-format image into a relatively small sensor in a modern SLR. He’s projecting the image from the large-format lens and bellows onto a screen made from an artist’s palette, a conveniently available piece of bright white plastic, and capturing that image with his SLR mounted beneath the large-format lens assembly. This would normally cause a perspective distortion, but to correct that he’s mounted his SLR lens at an offset.

He does point out that since less light reaches the camera there is also a change in the ISO setting on the camera, but once that has been taken into account it performs satisfactorily. The result is a camera that allows something rather unusual, for Victorian-style large-format images to come to life as video. He demonstrates it in the video below, complete with friends in suitably old-fashioned looking steampunk attire.

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Dead EBay Thermal Camera Is An Organ Donor

December 27, 2017 by Al Williams 16 Comments

[Damien] wanted to build a thermal camera. He was dismayed about how much a microbolometer costs so he salvaged one from a dead FLIR he picked up on eBay for 75 pounds. That’s about $100, and less than half what a new sensor costs. He selected one that didn’t turn on, which he hoped meant the Lepton 3 160×120 pixel microbolometer would not be the reason the camera failed.

Once it arrived, he pulled the pricey module, connected it to a breakout board and a Raspberry Pi. His gamble paid off; it worked fine. That wasn’t the end of the project, though. He went on to make a portable, self-contained camera with a rechargeable battery and an LCD screen.

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This DIY Turntable Just Got Freaky Fresh

November 24, 2017 by Lauren Faris 4 Comments

Photography turntables are made for both the precise and lazy. Whether you are concerned about the precision of consistent angles during a photo shoot or you simply do not want to stand there rotating a plate after every picture — yes, it does get old — a lazy susan style automatic photography turntable is the ticket. This automatic 360° design made over at circuito.io satisfies both of these needs in an understated package.

The parts required to make this DIY weekend project are about as minimal as they get. An Arduino Uno controls it all with a rotary encoder for input and a character LCD to display settings. The turntable moves using a stepper motor and an EasyDriver. It even takes care of controlling the camera using an IR LED.

The biggest obstruction most likely to arise is creating the actual laser cut casing itself. The circuito team avoided this difficulty by using Pololu‘s online custom laser cutting service for the 4 necessary laser cut parts. After all of the components have been brought together, all that is left to do is ~~Avengers~~ assemble. They provide step by step instructions for this process in such a straightforward way that you could probably put this sucker together blindfolded.

We have seen some other inspired photography turntables on Hackaday before. [NotionSunday] created a true turntable hack based off of the eject mechanism of an old DVD-ROM drive. With the whole thing spinning on the head assembly of a VCR, this is the epitome of letting nothing go to waste. We also displayed another very similar Arduino Uno controlled turntable created 2 years ago by [Tiffany Tseng]. There is even a non-electronic version out there of a DIY 360° photography turntable that only uses a lazy susan and tape measure. All of these photography turntable hacks do the job wonderfully, but there was something that we liked about the clean feel of this one. All of the necessary code for this project has been provided over at GitHub. What is your favorite photography turntable?

High Speed Chronograph Looks Like Pro Gear

November 14, 2017 by Tom Nardi 22 Comments

It can be hard enough to take a good photograph of a running kid or pet, and if we’re being honest, sometimes even stationary objects manage to elude our focus. Now imagine trying to take a picture of something moving really fast, like a bullet. Trying to capture the moment a fast moving projectile hits an object is simply not possible with a human behind the shutter button.

Enter the ballistic chronometer: a device that uses a set of sensor gates and a highly accurate timer to determine how fast an object is flying through it. Chronometers that operate up to a couple hundred meters per second are relatively common, but [td0g] had something a little faster in mind. He’s come up with an optical setup that he claims can capture objects moving as fast as Mach 2. With this chronometer tied into a high-speed flash rig, [td0g] is able to capture incredible shots such as the precise instant a bullet shatters a glass of water.

Because he couldn’t find any phototransistors with the sub-microsecond response time necessary to detect a small object moving at 1,000 m/s, [td0g] ended up using LEDs in a photoconductive configuration, where 27 VDC is applied backwards against the diode. Careful monitoring of voltage fluctuations across the diode allows for detection of changes in the received light level. To cut down on interference, [td0g] used IR LEDs as his light sources, reasoning there would be less ambient IR than if he used something in the visual range.

What really impresses with this build is the attention to detail and amount of polish [td0g] put into the design. From the slick angled bracket that holds the Arduino and LCD to the 3D printed covers over the optical gates, the final device looks like a professional piece of equipment with a price tag to rival that of a used car.

For the future, [td0g] plans on upgrading to faster comparators than he LM339’s he has installed currently, and springing for professionally done PCBs instead of protoboard. In its current state this is already a very impressive piece of kit, so we’d love to see what it looks like when it’s “finished”.

If you don’t need something quite this high end but still would like to see how fast something is going, we have covered chronometer builds to fit every budget.