Inviting The Public To Take Stereo Photos For Science

September 20, 2024 by Al Williams 14 Comments

[Lynnadeng]’s team wanted to monitor the Los Angeles River over time and wanted citizen scientists — or anyone, for that matter — to help. They built a dual phone holder to allow random passersby to use their phones to take photos. A QR code lets them easily send the pictures to the team. The 3D printed holder is fixed in place and has a known gap that allows stereo reconstruction from pairs of photos.

Of course, people aren’t going to know what to do, so you need a sign with instructions along with the QR code. One advantage to this scheme is that it’s cheap. All the camera hardware is in the public’s phone. Of course, you still have to make the holder robust to the elements, but that’s not nearly as difficult as supplying power and weatherproofing cameras and radios.

The real interesting part is the software. At first, we were disappointed that the post had a dead link to GitHub, but it was easy enough to find the correct one. In some cases, people will use a single camera, so 3D reconstruction isn’t always possible.

We love citizen science around here. No matter where you live, there are many opportunities to contribute.

How Much Resolution Does Film Really Have?

September 6, 2024 by Lewin Day 30 Comments

Have you ever scanned old negatives or print photographs? Then you’ve probably wondered about the resolution of your scanner, versus the resolution of what you’re actually scanning. Or maybe, you’ve looked at digital cameras, and wondered how many megapixels make up that 35mm film shot. Well [ShyStudios] has been pondering these very questions, and they’ve shared some answers.

The truth is that film doesn’t really have a specific equivalent resolution to a digital image, as it’s an analog medium that has no pixels. Instead, color is represented by photoreactive chemicals. Still, there are ways to measure its resolution—normally done in lines/mm, in the simplest sense.

[ShyStudios] provides a full explanation of what this means, as well as more complicated ways of interpreting analog film resolution. Translating this into pixel equivalents is messy, but [ShyStudios] does some calculations to put a 35mm FujiColor 200 print around the 54 megapixel level. Fancier films can go much higher.

Of course, there are limitations to film, and you have to use it properly. But still, it gives properly impressive resolution even compared to modern cameras. As it turns out, we’ve been talking about film a lot lately! Video after the break.

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Video Baby Monitor Repair Uncovers Private Data

September 2, 2024 by Tom Nardi 35 Comments

As the name of the channel implies, [BuyItFixIt] likes to pick up cheap gadgets that are listed as broken and try to repair them. It’s a pastime we imagine many Hackaday readers can appreciate, because even if you can’t get a particular device working, you’re sure to at least learn something useful along the way.

But after recently tackling a VTech video baby monitor from eBay, [BuyItFixIt] manages to do both. He starts by opening up the device and going through some general electronics troubleshooting steps. The basics are very much worth following along with if you’ve ever wondered how to approach a repair when you don’t know what the problem is. He checks voltages, makes sure various components are in spec, determines if the chips are talking to each other with the oscilloscope, and even pulls out the thermal camera to see if anything is heating up. But nothing seems out of the ordinary.

While poking around with the oscilloscope, however, he did notice what looked like the output of a serial debug port. Sure enough, when connected to a USB serial adapter, the camera’s embedded Linux operating system started dumping status messages into the terminal. But before it got too far along in the boot process, it crashed with a file I/O error — which explains why the hardware all seemed to check out fine.

Now that [BuyItFixIt] knew it was a software issue, he started using the tools built into the camera’s bootloader to explore the contents of the device’s flash chip. He uncovered the usual embedded Linux directories, but when he peeked into one of the partitions labeled Vtech_data2, he got a bit of a shock: the device seemed to be holding dozens of videos. This is particularly surprising considering the camera is designed to stream video to the parent unit, and the fact that it could record video internally was never mentioned in the documentation.

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Pulling Apart A Premium WebCam

August 21, 2024 by Al Williams 29 Comments

Over at EDN, [Brian Dipert] has been tearing down web cameras. A few months ago, he broke into a bargain basement camera. This time, he’s looking into a premium unit. Although we have to admit from some of what he reports, we are a little surprised at some of the corners cut. For example, it’s a 4K camera that doesn’t quite provide a 4K image. Despite a Sony CMOS sensor, [Brian] found the low-light performance to be poor. However, it does carry a much larger price tag than the previous camera examined.

The interesting part is about half way down the page when he tries to open the unit up. It seems like it is getting harder and harder to get into things and this camera was no exception. The device finally gives up. Inside is a relatively unremarkable board with a host of unknown ICs. One interesting item is a gyro chip that determines if the camera is upside down.

[Brian] managed to get the camera back together with no harm. It is interesting to compare it to the $15 camera he took apart earlier.

If you want maximum cred, do your video calls with a Game Boy camera. Or, at least, add your own lens to a webcam.

40,000 FPS Omega camera captures Olympic photo-finish

Olympic Sprint Decided By 40,000 FPS Photo Finish

August 17, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 55 Comments

Advanced technology played a crucial role in determining the winner of the men’s 100-meter final at the Paris 2024 Olympics. In a historically close race, American sprinter Noah Lyles narrowly edged out Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson by just five-thousandths of a second. The final decision relied on an image captured by an Omega photo finish camera that shoots an astonishing 40,000 frames per second.

This cutting-edge technology, originally reported by PetaPixel, ensured the accuracy of the result in a race where both athletes recorded a time of 9.78 seconds. If SmartThings’ shot pourer from the 2012 Olympics were still around, it could once again fulfill its intended role of celebrating US medals.

Omega, the Olympics’ official timekeeper for decades, has continually innovated to enhance performance measurement. The Omega Scan ‘O’ Vision Ultimate, the camera used for this photo finish, is a significant upgrade from its 10,000 frames per second predecessor. The new system captures four times as many frames per second and offers higher resolution, providing a detailed view of the moment each runner’s torso touches the finish line. This level of detail was crucial in determining that Lyles’ torso touched the line first, securing his gold medal.

This camera is part of Omega’s broader technological advancements for the Paris 2024 Olympics, which include advanced Computer Vision systems utilizing AI and high-definition cameras to track athletes in real-time. For a closer look at how technology decided this historic race, watch the video by Eurosport that captured the event.

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Old Time Stereographs Get New Photos

August 6, 2024 by Al Williams 34 Comments

In the late 1800s, the stereograph — sometimes incorrectly called a stereopticon — was a big craze. You’d view two side-by-side images through some lenses and see a three-dimensional image. This, of course, later would morph into View-Masters and, eventually, virtual reality headsets. But if you have an old stereograph, where do you get new images for it? If you are [Engineers Need Art], you write a program to convert MPO files (a common 3D image format) to printable stereograms. Interestingly, he used AI to assist in the project and has observations about where it helped and where it didn’t.

The post goes into a lot of detail about how the author experimented with 3D imaging for many years. However, it eventually discusses a MacOS application built with the help of an AI chatbot.

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Your QuickTake Camera And Your Modern PC

July 26, 2024 by Jenny List 10 Comments

An object of desire back in the mid-1990s might have been Apple’s QuickTake camera. In a form factor not unlike a monocular it packed a 640×480 digital camera, the images from which could be downloaded to a computer via a serial cable. A quarter century later it’s a great retro camera for the enthusiast, but both the serial ports and the operating systems needed to run its software have passed into history. Time for the junk pile? Not at all, for [Crazylegstoo] has produced a new piece of software for 2024 that works for both QuickTake 100 and 150 cameras with USB serial ports on modern operating systems.

Called JQuickTake, it’s a Java app which has the advantage of building on that early Java promise of running cross platform so can be had for Mac or Windows. It allows retrieval of both metadata and images from the camera, but sadly it doesn’t display any of the images. It also doesn’t work with the QuickTake 200. Happily though, there are instructions for building a serial cable, and suggestions for how to deal with the proprietary QTK image format.

Meanwhile if you lack a PC or Mac all is not lost. You can also use these cameras with an Apple II.

Header image: Hannes Grobe, CC BY-SA 4.0.