Hack Aims For Polaroid, Hits Game Boy Camera Sweet Spot

May 16, 2025 by Tyler August 8 Comments

There’s just some joy in an instant camera. They were never quality cameras, even in the glory days of Polaroid, but somehow the format has survived while the likes of Kodachrome have faded away. [Mellow_Labs] decided he wanted the instacam experience without the Polaroid pricing, so he made his own in the video embedded after the break.

At its core, it’s a simple project: an ESP32-CAM for the image (these were never great cameras, remember, so ESP32 is fine– and do you really get to call it an instant camera if you have to wait for a Raspberry Pi to boot up?) and a serial thermal printer for the “instant photo”part. This admittedly limits the project to black and white, and pretty low res, but B/W is artistic and Lo-Fi is hip, so this probably gives the [Mellow Labs] camera street cred with the kids, somehow. Honestly, this reminds us more of the old Gameboy Camera and its printer than anything made by Polaroid, and we are here for it.

The build video goes through the challenges [Mellow Labs] found interfacing the serial printer to the ESP32–which went surprisingly well for what looks like mostly vibe coding, though we’re not sure how much time he spent fixing the vibe code off camera–as well as a the adventure of providing a case that includes the most absurdly beefy battery we’ve ever seen on a camera. Check out the full video below.

Instant cameras are no stranger to Hackaday: this one used e-ink; this one uses film, but is made of gingerbread. In 2022 we wondered if we’d ever shake the Polaroid picture, and the answer appears to be “no” so far.

Thanks to [Mellow] for tooting his own horn by submitting this project to the tip line. We love to see what our readers get up to, so please– toot away!

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Thermal Monocular Brings The Heat At 10X

May 13, 2025 by Al Williams 5 Comments

[Project 326] is following up on his thermal microscope with a thermal telescope or, more precisely, a thermal monocular. In fact, many of the components and lenses in this project are the same as those in the microscope, so you could cannibalize that project for this one, if you wanted.

During the microscope project, [Project 326] noted that first-surface mirrors reflect IR as well as visible light. The plan was to make a Newtonian telescope for IR instead of light. While the resulting telescope worked with visible light, the diffraction limit prevented it from working for its intended purpose.

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A Single-Pixel Camera Without Moving Parts Using Compressed Sensing

May 12, 2025 by Maya Posch 18 Comments

One of the reconstructed images, using all 4,096 matrix patterns as input, next to the original object. (Credit: okooptics, Jon Bumstead)

There’s a strange allure to single-pixel cameras due to the simultaneous simplicity and yet fascinating features that they can offer, such as no set resolution limit. That said, the typical implementations that use some kind of scanning (MEMS) mirror or similar approach suffer from various issues even when you’re photographing a perfectly stationary and static scene due to their complex mechanical nature. Yet there’s a way around this, involving a LED matrix and a single photoresistor, as covered by [Jon Bumstead] in an article with accompanying video.

As he points out, this isn’t a new concept, with research papers cited that go back many years. At the core lies the signal processing technique called compressed sensing, which is incidentally also used with computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners. Compressed sensing enables the reconstruction of a signal from a series of samples, by using existing knowledge of the signal.

In the case of this single-pixel camera, the known information is the illumination, which is a Hadamard matrix pattern displayed on the 64 x 64 pixel LED matrix, ergo 4,096 possible patterns. A total of 4,096 samples are thus recorded, which are subsequently processed with a Matlab script. As pointed out, even 50% of the maximum possible matrices can suffice here, with appropriately chosen patterns.

While not an incredibly fast method, it is fully solid-state, can be adapted to use other wavelengths, and with some tweaking of the used components probably could cut down the sampling time required.

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Prusa Mini with endoscope nozzle cam and pip preview

Prusa Mini Nozzle Cam On The Cheap

May 2, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 2 Comments

Let me throw in a curveball—watching your 3D print fail in real-time is so much more satisfying when you have a crisp, up-close view of the nozzle drama. That’s exactly what [Mellow Labs] delivers in his latest DIY video: transforming a generic HD endoscope camera into a purpose-built nozzle cam for the Prusa Mini. The hack blends absurd simplicity with delightful nerdy precision, and comes with a full walkthrough, a printable mount, and just enough bad advice to make it interesting. It’s a must-see for any maker who enjoys solder fumes with their spaghetti monsters.

What makes this build uniquely brilliant is the repurposing of a common USB endoscope camera—a tool normally reserved for inspecting pipes or internal combustion engines. Instead, it’s now spying on molten plastic. The camera gets ripped from its aluminium tomb, upgraded with custom-salvaged LEDs (harvested straight from a dismembered bulb), then wrapped in makeshift heat-shrink and mounted on a custom PETG bracket. [Mellow Labs] even micro-solders in a custom connector just so the camera can be detached post-print. The mount is parametric, thanks to a community contribution.

This is exactly the sort of hacking to love—clever, scrappy, informative, and full of personality. For the tinkerers among us who like their camera mounts hot and their resistor math hotter, this build is a weekend well spent.

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LayerLapse Simplifies 3D Printer Time-lapse Shots

April 8, 2025 by Tom Nardi 15 Comments

We know you’ve seen them: the time-lapses that show a 3D print coming together layer-by-layer without the extruder taking up half the frame. It takes a little extra work compared to just pointing a camera at the build plate, but it’s worth it to see your prints materialize like magic.

Usually these are done with a plugin for OctoPrint, but with all due respect to that phenomenal project, it’s a lot to get set up if you just want to take some pretty pictures. Which is why [Whopper Printing] put together the LayerLapse. This small PCB is designed to trigger your DSLR or mirrorless camera once its remotely-mounted hall effect sensor detects the presence of a magnet.

The idea is that you just need to stick a small magnet to your extruder, add a bit of extra G-code that will park it over the sensor at the end of each layer, and you’re good to go. There’s even a spare GPIO pin broken out should you want to trigger something else on each layer of your print. Admittedly we can’t think of anything else right now that would make sense, other than some other type of camera, but we’re sure some creative folks out there could put this feature to use.

Currently, [Whopper Printing] is selling the LayerLapse as a finished product, though it does sound like a kit version is in the works. There’s also instructions for building a DIY version of the hardware using your microcontroller of choice. Whether you buy or build the hardware, the firmware is available under the MIT license for your tinkering pleasure.

Being hardware hackers, we appreciate the stand-alone nature of this solution. But if you’re already controlling your printer through OctoPrint, you’re probably better off just setting up one of the available time-lapse plugins.

A Low F Number Lens, From Scratch

April 6, 2025 by Jenny List 54 Comments

The F-number of a photographic lens is a measure of its light-gathering ability, and is expressed as its aperture diameter divided by its focal length. Lenses with low F-numbers are prized by photographers for their properties, but are usually expensive because making a good one can be something of a challenge. Nevertheless [Rulof] is giving it a go, making an 80mm F0.5 lens with a Sony E-mount. The video below the break has all the details, and also serves as a fascinating primer on lens design if you are interested.

Rather than taking individual lenses, he’s starting with the second-hand lens from an old projector. It’s got the required huge aperture, but it’s by no means a photographic lens. An interesting component is his choice of diaphragm for the variable aperture, it’s a drafting aid for drawing circles which closely resembles a photographic part. This is coupled with the triplet from an old SLR lens in a 3D-printed enclosure, and the result is a lens that works even if it may not be the best. We know from experiences playing with lens systems that adjusting the various components of a compound lens like this one can be very difficult; we can see it has the much sought-after bokeh or blurred background, but it lacks sharpness.

Perhaps because a camera is an expensive purchase, we don’t see as much of this kind of hacking as we’d like. That’s not to say that lenses don’t sometimes make their way here.

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Zink Is Zero Ink — Sort Of

March 31, 2025 by Al Williams 37 Comments

When you think of printing on paper, you probably think of an ink jet or a laser printer. If you happen to think of a thermal printer, we bet you think of something like a receipt printer: fast and monochrome. But in the last few decades, there’s been a family of niche printers designed to print snapshots in color using thermal technology. Some of them are built into cameras and some are about the size of a chunky cell phone battery, but they all rely on a Polaroid-developed technology for doing high-definition color printing known as Zink — a portmanteau of zero ink.

For whatever reason, these printers aren’t a household name even though they’ve been around for a while. Yet, someone must be using them. You can buy printers and paper quite readily and relatively inexpensively. Recently, I saw an HP-branded Zink printer in action, and I wasn’t expecting much. But I was stunned at the picture quality. Sure, it can’t print a very large photo, but for little wallet-size snaps, it did a great job.

The Tech

Polaroid was well known for making photographic paper with color layers used in instant photography. In the 1990s, the company was looking for something new. The Zink paper was the result. The paper has three layers of amorphochromic dyes. Initially, the dye is colorless, but will take on a particular color based on temperature.

The key to understanding the process is that you can control the temperature that will trigger a color change. The top layer of the paper requires high heat to change. The printer uses a very short pulse, so that the top layer will turn yellow, but the heat won’t travel down past that top layer.

The middle layer — magenta — will change at a medium heat level. But to get that heat to the layer, the pulse has to be longer. The top layer, however, doesn’t care because it never gets to the temperature that will cause it to turn yellow.

The bottom layer is cyan. This dye is set to take the lowest temperature of all, but since the bottom heats up slowly, it takes an even longer pulse at the lower temperature. The top two layers, again, don’t matter since they won’t get hot enough to change. A researcher involved in the project likened the process to fried ice cream. You fry the coating at a high temperature for a short time to avoid melting the ice cream. Or you can wait, and the ice cream will melt without affecting the coating.

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