Four Meter Light Paintings

September 12, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

HaD

We’ve seen some light painting before – waving a microcontroller and LED strip in front of a camera is a very interesting project after all. [Saulius]’ light painting stick is unlike anything we’ve seen before, though. It’s huge – four meters high, and is also very flexible in the field, drawing images served up from a smart phone.

To get his pictures onto his light painting stick, [Saulius] used the very cool Carambola, an exceedingly small board that also runs Python. The images were converted to a 128xWhatever .BMP file served to the Carambola over WiFi with a smart phone, Since the Carambola runs Linux, sometimes a kernel interrupt would mistakenly restart the drawing process. [Saulius] found a way around that by writing the drawing code in C and wrapping that in a Python module. The speed of C and the flexibility of Python, who could ask for more.

On the project page, you can see [Saulius] pulling off some very cool light paintings. Even though the Hackaday logo is the best way to get on the front page here, this pic is probably the most impressive

Use Your New-timey Printer To Make An Old-timey Camera

September 8, 2013 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

3d-printed-pinhole-camera

Here’s something to show people who don’t realize the power of 3D printing. This pinhole camera has one moving part which reveals the pinhole, letting in light to expose the 4×5 film inside.

It’s a near perfect roundup of all the qualities a 3D printer has to offer. The build centers around a 4×5 film holder which can be acquired used or as surplus. This drives home the concept of having the power to replace parts (in this case the entire camera) that fit with existing pieces (the film holder). The picture above is big enough that you can see the layers on the pyramid shape, but the structural pieces around the frame also let the uninitiated see that you can print more than just solid blocks. And finally, since it’s up for download on Thingiverse its a good example of how the printing community shares and builds on each others’ work.

Does it take quality photos? We have no idea. So far we didn’t see any example pictures. But really, if you’re looking for top quality you might want to build your own digital camera. Here’s one that uses a 14 megapixel sensor.

Jack The DVD Ripping Robot

September 5, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 56 Comments

[Andy] had a fairly large problem on his hands. For the last 15 years, he’s been collecting DVDs, and since he began, he’s run out of space on his shelves for these miraculous plastic discs. Everything’s going to the cloud now, so he decided to build a media server, replete with rips of all his DVDs. As anyone who has ever tried to rip a movie knows, this can be a very long and tedious process. His solution to this should be something near and dear to all of us – he decided to build a robot to rip all his DVDs automatically.

With a brand new 3D printer, [Andy] set to work on designing Jack the Ripper Bot. The design has two trays mounted to a standard computer DVD drive, an ‘in’ tray and an ‘out’ tray. The frame of the machine bolts directly to the drive, and the entire contraption is driven by only three standard hobby servos.

The robot is driven by a Raspberry Pi, but the ripping actually takes place on an old laptop. [Andy] says it takes about an hour and a quarter to rip a DVD, so a full ‘in’ tray of 24 discs means about 28 hours of ripping time. Feeding the machine once a day is a lot better than returning to the computer every hour or so, we think.

All the STLs for the printed parts and the software for the Raspi and computer are up on [Andy]’s github, should anyone want to upgrade this to a Blu Ray ripper.

Thanks [Stephen] for sending this one in.

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Scratch-built Gigapixel Scanner

September 1, 2013 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

scratch-built-gigapixel-scanner

The presence of a camera in this image may be a bit confusing since we’re calling it a scanner. What’s actually going on is that macro-images this piece of art are being captured automatically. The multiple shots will later be assembled into one fascinatingly high-resolution image. The CNC scanner rig is [Charlie Romer’s] summer project.

Unfortunately [Charlie] hasn’t yet collected all the information on the project into one place. After the break you’ll find more images, as well as a few demo videos. The best place to start is probably his proof-of-concept from this Spring. He shows a single-axis CNC mount for the camera. It takes an entire row of images. The assembled photo from that test is shown below. We believe the faint yellow dots in the macro part of the example are fingerprints purposefully left by the printer called printer stenography to help prevent forgery.

The larger rig uses movement on two axes. The idea is that the artwork will be perfectly positioned so that manual focus set at one point will work along all points in the capture routine. He’s using a lamp for a light source but we’re sure he will upgrade so something like a ring light as the project continues.

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360° Photography Made Easy

August 30, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 32 Comments

rotate

The graphic above wasn’t painstakingly stitched together by rotating a camera lens on a lazy suzan a tiny bit, taking a picture, and repeating the process fifty times. This is high tech stuff, courtesy of Zcapture, a tool for automated 360 degree photography of small objects.

For the last 15 years, [Jared] has been spending a lot of time on eCommerce and found existing solutions to displaying products online to be very lacking. After playing around with the Basic Stamp eight years ago and most recently the Arduino, [jared] decided he would build something to solve his problem – an automated box that takes pictures of a rotating product.

Inside the Zcapture is an Arduino connected to a motor and the software to control Canon and Nikon DSLRs. Put the Zcapture in a soft box, light it up, set up your camera, and you have a computer-controlled lazy suzan robot that will take pictures of any object, then stitch them together into an animated GIF or a fancy eCommerce rotating image viewer

GoPro Slingshot

August 21, 2013 by Eric Evenchick 18 Comments

Want to try out aerial photography, but can’t afford a quadcopter? [Jeremy] rigged up a low cost GoPro Slingshot and took some pretty nice flyover shots of the lake.

The slingshot itself is meant for water balloons, but easily has enough power to fire the camera. In order to get good video, some stabilization was needed. [Jeremy] made a stabilizing fin out of packaging foam, and used an eye bolt to connect it to the GoPro’s threaded tripod mount. The simple tail fin made of out foam and zip ties actually did a good job of stabilizing the camera.

This looks like a fun experiment to try when you’re at the lake, since you can probably build it with stuff lying around the house. For [Jeremy], it also proved to be a way to keep his dog entertained since she retrieved the camera after each shot. After the break, check out the video footage from the GoPro slinging rig.

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Swapping The Sensor In A DSLR

August 12, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 33 Comments

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

To take a color image, modern digicams have something called a Bayer pattern – small red green and blue filters, one color for each pixel – that drastically reduce the resolution if all you’re doing is taking black and white pictures. [Lasse] is an astrophotographer, and doesn’t exactly need color pictures, so he decided to swap the color sensor in his camera with a monochrome CCD.

Most DSLRs have CCD sensors on strange surface mount packages or put everything on flex PCBs. [Lasse]’s Olympus E-500, though, features an 8 Megapixel CCD on a ceramic DIP that is actually fairly easy to remove given the right tools and just a little bit of mechanical encouragement.

After putting in a new monochrome CCD, [Lasse] had a much more sensitive sensor in his camera, and processing the RAW files off the camera gives him a great improvement for his astrophotography.

This isn’t [Lasse]’s first adventure in tearing apart DSLRs for astrophotography. Earlier, he uncovered the secrets of the Four Thirds lens format with a logic analyzer, making his Olympus camera a wonderful tool for looking into the heavens.