digital cameras hacks

1045 Articles

Building An M7 Pan Tilt Head Controller

October 15, 2026 by 10 Comments

The Soonpho M7 Pan Tilt Head is a useful photography tool for remotely aiming a decently-sized camera. Only, [Kyle Housley] wanted a little more control than was available out of the box. Hence, he built a custom controller that could deliver just that.

The project is based around an ESP32-S3 paired with an NRF24L01 wireless module. The ESP32-S3 is hooked up to a computer to receive commands over serial on what movements to make. It then transmits over the NRF24L01 to another NRF24L01 module that has been hacked into the original M7’s controller. In doing so, it can command the M7 to move to a given specific pan and tilt position, or to make a smooth motion along a vector. It can also trigger shutter release in the attached camera as needed, to capture whatever is being looked at.

[Kyle] has used this rig to create a motion tracking system for aircraft photography. With a Yolo vision model running on a laptop, the pan-tilt head can be commanded to track aircraft passing by and photograph them when they’re in frame. It’s a pretty slick setup; we’d love to see similar done with the aid of ADS-B data, too—perhaps even with automatic image tagging and upload.  Continue reading “Building An M7 Pan Tilt Head Controller” →

Upgrading An IPhone Lens To The Max

October 6, 2026 by 7 Comments

The camera in a typical mobile phone is now at a standard at which it can be considered a serious device rather than a toy, such has been the effort put in by the phone manufacturers. They are still held back in some ways by their lenses despite the same development effort being pointed in that direction, and there have been projects aiming to replace those lenses with better quality ones. A while back we covered [Evan Monsma]’s replacement of his broken iPhone camera lens with a C-mount item, and now he’s back with a much improved version.

The original was glued on with cyanoacrylate adhesive, and this had parted. It was time to upgrade the phone, so he had a new lens mount covering two of the cameras machined from solid brass and leaving an open view for the third and unmodified camera. This was fixed to the phone with epoxy, and with a set of 3D printed lens covers to protect them he’s ready to go. There’s even a tripod thread machined into the bottom of this thing. He shows us it in action with both C-mount and EF-mount lenses, the latter resulting in a very long effective focal length.

We like this project, but perhaps we’d give it an IR filter to remove the unwanted pink glow. If you’re interested, here’s the original version.

Continue reading “Upgrading An IPhone Lens To The Max” →

Own The OSD Chip In Your Cheap Composite Monitor

October 3, 2026 by 11 Comments

[Ogrinz Labs] has built a Robbie the Robot suit, which is super-cool, but has a huge flaw. When inside the suit, he’s too tall to do what the original Robbie actor did, which was to look through the “mouth” grille. He solved this with an inexpensive automotive reversing camera, but then realised its monitor had a built-in on-screen-display chip. After a lot of work, he’s published a GitHub repository that allows access to this thing for custom on-screen graphics.

The chip in question is an AMT630A, which contains video switching hardware, a graphics system for the on-screen-display, and an 8052 microcontroller core. He didn’t manage to get into the 8052’s brain, but the video below details the long path towards controlling it through an I2C port with an ESP32. The software is available as an Arduino library. His intention is to use it as a display for navigational sensor data to aid in maneuvering Robbie.

Given the status of Robbie as a sci-fi movie icon, it should come as no surprise that we’ve featured this suit before,

Continue reading “Own The OSD Chip In Your Cheap Composite Monitor” →

Digital Upgrade Brings Medium Format Camera Into The 21st Century

September 22, 2026 by 12 Comments

Large format cameras can produce amazing shots, but are a bit too bulky to be practical. Medium format is a different story, as [Wenting] demonstrates with his Sitina B220M — an open-source digital back for the Mamiya Super 23 camera using a full-frame Kodak CCD.

“Digital back” just means he’s replacing the rear of an existing film camera in order to put a sensor where said film used to live. The sensor is a 22 Megapixel Kodak KAF-22000CE, which measures in at a very respectable 38.8 mm by 50 mm. That’s only a touch smaller than the rolls of 120 the camera was designed for, whose large dimension was 56 mm. How much was exposed at a time was determined by the back you put on the camera, but would never have been below 41.5 mm. Again, the CCD is pretty close.

With Mamiya covering the optics, [Wenting] could focus on the digital end. He’s got a Xilinx Zynq 7010 running the show, making use of both that SoC’s Cortex-A9 cores and its built-in FPGA. There’s some decent info on how that works in the build video embedded below, if you don’t want to dig into the code at the GitLab repository above. The photos look great, and start at 8:25.

[Wenting] has been around the bush with FPGAs before. Not least in his e-ink monitor project, but also with the last iteration of his mirror-less digital camera. This version is perhaps less ambitious, being merely a digital back and not the whole enchilada, but it solves some design issues he had on the “camera” part while he focuses on the “digital” for now.

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3D Imaging Without A Lens

September 10, 2026 by 19 Comments

There are plenty of ways to capture 3D images or simulations of such if you know what you’re doing with camera hardware and fancy mathematics. However, a little more unusual is the idea of capturing a 3D image while using no lens at all — and yet, [okooptics] has achieved just that!

The basic concept builds on an older project from [okooptics], wherein images were captured from a Raspberry Pi camera with no regular lens element installed. In its place was a thin layer of Scotch tape over the sensor, acting as a diffuser. With the right deconvolution math, it’s possible to actually recover a real image out of the blurry mess this setup initially captures. [okooptics] was then able to push this into three dimensions by weighting the point spread function used to deconvolute the image.

Adding directional bias to the process creates a similar effect to slightly shifting the cameras position, actually revealing a view from a slightly different angle of objects in front of the camera. [okooptics] does a great job of explaining the science behind how this is possible and the practical limitations of the technique, also referencing research papers that have explored these ideas in great depth.

It’s math heavy to extract 3D data from what otherwise looks like blurry nothingness, but it’s possible if you know what you’re doing. For a fuller understanding, it’s worth diving into [okooptics] earlier work in this realm, taking photos with Scotch tape in place of a lens.

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Digital “Film” For Your Pi Camera

August 31, 2026 by 2 Comments

The formula of a Raspberry Pi camera is such that it’s almost a self-assembly kit of parts. Over the years we’ve seen a lot of attempts to make one that’s more impressive, usually due to a different take on a case design. It’s not often we see something genuinely out of the ordinary, and perhaps [Strange Inventions] has made one. He’s produced an instant camera where the “film” is a removable cartridge containing a color e-paper display.

It’s a straightforward enough idea: the camera writes the image to the display, and since these displays are persistent, there it stays. The displays connect via headers, and the cartridge slips in in a similar manner to a console game cartridge. They’re not cheap, but at least unlike a Polaroid or Instax cartridge, they are reusable.

You’ll have to pay up if you want to download the files, but it’s not outrageously expensive if you really want to build one. But perhaps the key here is that it’s not something beyond the abilities of the average Hackaday reader to make their own. We’re sure this idea will be expanded upon by others in due course.

Meanwhile, if it’s simpler instant photography you crave, you can always print the real thing.

Continue reading “Digital “Film” For Your Pi Camera” →

Panoramic Photography With A Linear Scanner

August 28, 2026 by 20 Comments

Although digital photography took a big bite of the film industry’s lunch, it wasn’t able to completely eliminate the need — or desire — for photographers to use film in some situations. But digital information from a camera sensor can be manipulated to augment the natural physical capabilities of a camera in ways not really feasible for film. High dynamic range images, focus and exposure stacking, and automatic panoramic stitching. This camera takes the latter example to the extreme.

[Philo]’s proof of concept was a smartphone camera set on a chair and rotated around a room. Some software grabbed a single column of pixels as it moved and stitched them all together to form an image. This came out well enough that the idea was refined a few times, but it wasn’t until a single-line digital camera meant for imaging assembly lines was found that this really took off. Using the camera and some custom software, [Philo] was eventually able to take some of the longest panoramic images we’ve seen, using things like railways and boats as the track the camera rides on, with accelerometer data to help stabilize the image.

The results speak for themselves. There’s a bit of wobble from the movement of the various vehicles despite the accelerometer data, but given that the image is coming from a sensor meant for examining conveyor belts, it’s hard to complain. Of course, if you want to stick to film, there are panoramic film cameras available too even if they don’t quite have the reach of this digital one.