Eye-Fi Teardown

February 1, 2009 by Eliot 44 Comments

eye-fi

[les robots] had a defective Eye-Fi card on his hands and when a replacement was sent, he was told to destroy the original. What better way to ‘destroy’ something than opening the case? The Eye-Fi is an SD card with a builtin WiFi radio so it can upload images while remaining in camera. One version uses Skyhook’s location service to geotag photos. You can see a few photos of the dismantled card on Flickr. The board is manufactured by Wintec. The wireless side is handled by Atheros’ ROCm, the same low power Radio-on-Chip module you would find in a mobile phone. The flash memory comes from Samsung and the antenna is along the back edge, where it has the best chance of getting signal.

Autofocus Assist Light

January 26, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

afassist

[Aki]’s Nikon D2H did not come with an autofocus assist light. His other cameras have them, and he likes the feature, so he decided to hack one into his D2H. He wired into the AF system, so that his LED gets voltage when the shutter release is pressed half way. The circuit needs refinement though, he found that the light was staying on during shutter release and affecting his light metering. You can see the hack in action after the break.
Continue reading “Autofocus Assist Light” →

Hands Free Point Of View Camera

January 24, 2009 by Eliot 31 Comments

handsfree

Here’s an odd little footnote we found while perusing the Comic Tools blog. [Matt Bernier]’s blog is dedicated to drawing and inking tutorials for comic artists. He uses a lot of example photographs that involve both hands. This week, at the bottom of his post on cleaning brushes, he included a photo to illustrate how he takes all of these point of view shots. The camera is strapped securely to his head using an old lanyard. He can see the display and access the controls on the back. After composing his shot, he just sets the timer, and you get a picture of what the process looks like from his perspective. Sure, it looks silly from this angle, but it really helps out the posts.

Chumby Digital Picture Frame Teardown

January 20, 2009 by Eliot 27 Comments

At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Chumby unveiled their latest prototype. It’s a network connected digital picture frame that runs Flash widgets. Just like the current Chumby model, they’re publishing the software and hardware under a license designed to let you hack it. They let us borrow one of their open chassis evaluation kits to teardown and photograph. We’ve got more pictures, full specs, and the schematics below.

Continue reading “Chumby Digital Picture Frame Teardown” →

Cat5 Camera Flash Extension

January 17, 2009 by Eliot 11 Comments

extension

Network engineer [Mario Giambanco] recently purchased a cable to move his flash off camera. Unfortunately, it ended up way too short for his purposes. Instead of purchasing a slightly longer proprietary cable, he decided to employ what he had around him: a lot of cat5e cable and ethernet jacks. He cut the cable close to the center in case things didn’t work out and he’d need to repair it. His post on building the custom ethernet flash extension cable goes into heavy detail to make sure you get it right the first time. He’s tested it using both five and 50 foot pieces of cable with no apparent lag.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen cat5 repurposed: composite video through cat5, vga cat5 extension, and cat5 speaker cables.

[via Lifehacker]

Putting FD Lenses On A D60

January 11, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 15 Comments

lens

[Peter] sent in this really slick project where he ads an FD lens mount to a cannon EOS D60. He already had a collection of nice lenses and didn’t want to waste them. After finding some a donor camera for the FD mount, he purchased a cheap D60 to graft it onto. While his first impulse was to simply glue the new mount onto the front of the camera, it was evident that this would hold the lenses too far from the sensor. The camera went under a bit for a while and luckily, no real damage was done to the mirror housing. The final result seems to work very well, there are example galleries available on his site.

Removing Fisheye Distortion

December 21, 2008 by Eliot 14 Comments

fisheye

Reader [alex] had a commercial plugin for fisheye lens correction and wondered exactly what kind of magic was behind it. Was it actually doing line detection? He dropped in a square grid to see what it spit out. The warped result indicated that the transformation was completely independent of the photo’s content. Using this result as a guide he was able to create a similar transform using Warp and save it as a script. The script generates almost identical results and now he knows exactly how little magic is involved.