digital cameras hacks

941 Articles

camera dolly

Timelapse Photography On An Android-Powered Dolly

October 11, 2014 by 3 Comments

If you’re heading off on a trip to Alaska, you need to make sure you have plenty of supplies on hand for the wilderness that awaits. If you’re [Bryce], that supply list includes some interesting photography equipment, including a camera dolly that he made to take time-lapse video of the fantastic scenery.

On the hardware side, the dolly carries the camera on a rail that is set up on a slant. The camera starts on one side and moves up and towards the otherside which creates a unique effect in the time-lapse. The rig is driven by a stepper motor, and rides on some pretty fancy bearings. The two cameras [Bryce] plans to use are a Canon T2i and a EOS-M which sit on the top from a tripod.

The software and electronics side is interesting as well. Instead of the usual Arduino, [Bryce] opted for controlling the rig through Android and a IOIO board. This gives the project a lot of options for communications, including Bluetooth. The whole thing is powered by a 19V battery pack. If you’re looking for something a little simpler, you might want to check out the egg timer for time lapse! Check out the video of [Bryce]’s rig in action after the break.

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Photography Rig Captures Holy Grail Shots

October 8, 2014 by 6 Comments

You’ve seen amazing shots of water spouts and milk crowns. You’ve seen shots of bullets piercing glass ornaments, playing cards, and poor, defenseless pieces of fruit. Maybe you’ve even seen that holy grail of shots—a bullet piercing a water spout. But how is it done? How do photographers capture this two-headed mythical beast of high-speed photography? [Maurice] has cracked the code and shared it for all to see.

He uses a Camera Axe to trigger the camera, a device he came up with years ago that’s on its fifth version. His setup uses a 100mm macro lens, a key flash, and two fill flashes that sit behind a diffusing wall of whiteness. All three flashes are connected to a multi-flash board which feeds into Camera Axe. [Maurice] explains how he gets nice, tall water spouts by thickening it with xanthan gum. He adds Jet Dry to reduce the surface tension and some food coloring to keep things interesting.

[Maurice] also runs through his pellet shooting rig, which he made with some polyethylene tubing and an air compressor. He ended up shooting the pellets at 20psi, which sends them traveling at 75 feet per second. They move slowly enough that he can use his own stomach to stop them in the demonstration. Dialing in just the right settings to get the pellet to intersect the spout at the right time took some finagling, and that will hold true for anyone who attempts to recreate this setup. He gives a link to his code files in the video description to get you started. Video is after the break.

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Raspberry Pi IR camera

Camera Mod Lets This Raspberry Pi Shoot In Different Spectrums

October 3, 2014 by 7 Comments

For [Peter Le Roux’] first “real” electronics project, he decided to make a camera based off the venerable Raspberry Pi platform. But he didn’t just want a regular camera, he wanted something that could shoot in near IR wave lengths…

It’s a well-known fact that you can remove the IR blocking filter from most cameras to create a quasi IR camera hack – heck, that hack has been around nearly as long as we have! The problem is even if you let the IR light into the camera’s sensor, you still get all the other light unless you have some kind of filter. There are different ways of doing this, so [Peter] decided to do them all with an adjustable wheel to flip through all the different filters.

He designed the case after the PiBow enclosure – you can see our full Pi Case Roundup here – and had it all laser cut out of wood. Stick around after the break to see a nice explanation of the light spectrum and the various filters [Peter] uses.

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Adding A Digital Back To A Sweet Old Camera

September 29, 2014 by 30 Comments

[Eugene] wanted to use his vintage Leica M4 as a digital camera, and he had a Canon EOS 350D digital camera sitting around unused. So he Frankensteined them together and added a digital back to the Leica’s optical frontend.

It sounds simple, right? All you’d need to do is chop off the back from the EOS 350D, grind the digital sensor unit down to fit into exactly the right spot on the film plane, glue it onto an extra Leica M4 back door, and you’re set. Just a little bit of extremely precise hackery. But it’s not even that simple.

Along the way [Eugene] reverse-engineered the EOS 350D’s shutter and mirror box signals (using a Salae Logic probe), and then replicated these signals when the Leica shutter was tripped by wedging an Arduino MiniPro into an old Leica motor-winder case. The Arduino listens for the Leica’s bulb-flash signal to tell when the camera fires, and then sends along the right codes to the EOS back. Sweet.

There are still a few outstanding details. The shutter speed is limited by the latency in getting the signal from the Leica to the 350D back, so he’s stuck at shutter speeds longer than 1/8th of a second. Additionally, the Canon’s anti-IR filter didn’t fit, but he has a new one ordered. These quibbles aside, it’s a beautiful hack so far.

What makes a beautiful piece of work even more beautiful? Sharing the source code and schematics. They’re both available at his Github.

Of course, if you don’t mind completely gutting the camera, you could always convert your old Leica into a point and shoot.

Third Person Skydiving

September 27, 2014 by 8 Comments

GoPros were invented for a few reasons, and skydiving is right at the top of that list. You’ll be hard pressed to find a regular skydiver that doesn’t own at least one of the little cameras, and there are a few examples of helmets with three or four GoPros tacked on.

This is an entirely new application. Yes, you can now film yourself skydiving with a third person view.

[Jason] hacked together this camera rig in an hour by strapping a GoPro on a Nerf Vortex football, tying a length of paracord to the camera mount, and connecting the other end to a hip ring on the parachute harness. It took three flights to get the canopy in the camera’s field of view, but the results are spectacular. It’s a tad bit unstable when turning, but the fins on the Nerf football make for a very, very stable shot.

[Jason] isn’t jumping out of a plane with this contraption already dangling underneath him; the football, camera, and paracord rig isn’t launched until the canopy fully deploys. It’s perfectly safe, but we’ll expect someone to get the idea of strapping a keychain camera to their pilot chute soon.

Using a Gimbal to Balance Your Coffee

Auto-Balancing Gimbal Keeps Your Coffee From Spilling

September 19, 2014 by 35 Comments

[Joe] works in one of those fancy offices that has some… unique furniture. Including a swinging boardroom table. See where we’re going with this? [Joe] made his own coffee cup gimbal.

The gimbal itself is made out of solid steel, welded together for maximum durability. He first built it out of plastic to test the concept, but then quickly moved to the all-metal solution. It’s a 2-axis gimbal featuring very powerful brushless DC motors, capable of balancing even a light-weight DSLR — however we think balancing a coffee cup is much more entertaining. It does this with ease, even when sitting on the treacherous swinging boardroom table (of DOOM).

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Controlling A Point And Shoot With Bluetooth

September 12, 2014 by 1 Comment

Loading point and shoot digital cameras is old hat around here, but [Alex] and [Andreas] are taking it to the next level. They’ve made a Bluetooth controller for a cheap Canon camera, allowing pictures to be taken with an iPhone or Android device.

The camera in question is a Canon IXUS70, although any camera supported by CHDK will work. We’ve seen a few builds using this firmware to take pictures of the sunrise every day and transmitting images over a radio link, but this build is far more interactive.

The camera is connected to an Arduino and Bluetooth shield with a hacked up USB cable. The ‘duino communicates with a phone using a JQuery app, giving any phone with a Bluetooth module control of the camera’s zoom and shutter.

All the code is available on the github, with a very good video demonstration of the build available below.

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