digital cameras hacks

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40,000 FPS Omega camera captures Olympic photo-finish

Olympic Sprint Decided By 40,000 FPS Photo Finish

August 17, 2024 by 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 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 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.

Photoresistor-based Single Pixel Camera

July 23, 2024 by 18 Comments

[Hugh] has been going back through episodes of the Hackaday podcast, and Elliot mentioned in episode 67 that it can often be inspiring to go back through the archives of Hackaday to find ideas for new projects. Well, he did just that and came across a single-pixel camera made using an infrared photodiode. He decided to try and hack together his own single-pixel camera, but this time on the cheap and using an ever simpler component – a photoresistor!

His description of the project tickled me – “I’ve used an ESP32, MicroPython, two servos, a peanut butter jar lid, a toilet paper roll, a paper towel roll, magnets and scrap wood for this version.” That’s certainly a much simpler bill of materials than the original (which was written up by Hackaday way back in 2015), which used a nice metal frame to hold everything together. However, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with improvising with things you happen to have to hand.

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Hacking An IP Camera To Run Your Own Software

July 17, 2024 by 18 Comments

Ah, generic unbranded IP cameras. Safe, secure? Probably not. [Alex] has been hacking around with one of his very own, and he’s recently busted the thing wide open.

Determining that the camera had a software update function built in, [Alex] saw an opening for hijinks. The first issue was that the camera only accepts encrypted update packages, which complicates things somewhat. However, through some smart reverse engineering, the format of the updates and their encryption method became obvious to [Alex]. Oh, and partly because there was a GitHub repository online featuring the source code used by the manufacturer to encrypt their updates. That definitely helped. It also led [Alex] to suspect the manufacturer may not have properly respected the open source license of some of the routines involved.

In the demo of the exploit, [Alex] has the camera reach out to www.pudim.com.br instead of the servers of the original manufacturer. That’s a pretty clear way to show that the camera has been owned.

We first featured [Alex]’s work in this space all the way back in 2019. It’s come a long way since then!

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Samsung Killed The Online Service, This 20 Dollar Dongle Brings It Back

July 9, 2024 by 14 Comments

Around 2010 or so, Samsung cameras came with an online service: Social Network Services. It enabled pictures to be unloaded wirelessly to social media with minimum hassle, which back then wasn’t quite as easily accomplished as it is today. Sadly they shuttered the service in 2021, leaving that generation of cameras, like so many connected devices, orphaned. Now along comes [Ge0rG] with a replacement, replicating the API on a $20 LTE dongle.

The dongle in question is one we featured a couple of years ago, packing a Linux-capable computer of similar power to a Raspberry Pi Zero alongside its cell modem. The camera can connect to the device, and a photo can be sent in a Mastodon post. It’s something of a modern version of the original, but for owners of the affected cameras it’s a useful recovery of a lost service.

It’s surprising in a way that we’ve not heard of more hacks using these dongles, as they do represent a useful opportunity. That we haven’t should be seen as a measure of the success of the Raspberry Pi and other boards like it, just as it’s no longer worth hacking old routers for Linux hardware projects, so there’s less of a need to do the same here.

8MM Digitization For Anyone

June 28, 2024 by 8 Comments

There’s a pleasing retro analogue experience to shooting Super 8 film, giving as it does the feel of a 1970s home movie to your work. But once you’ve had the film developed, there’s a need for a projector to enjoy the result. Far better to digitize it for a more modern viewing and editing experience. [Elbert] has made a digitizer for 8mm film which takes the best approach, snapping each frame individually to be joined together in a video file as a whole.

The frame of the device is 3D printed, but some parts of a film transport must be higher quality than a printed part can deliver. These, in particular the sprockets, are salvaged from a film viewer, and the movement is powered by a set of stepper motors. The steppers are controlled by an ESP32, and the optics are provided by a USB microscope. All this is hooked up to a PC which grabs each image, and finally stitches them all together using ffmpeg.

As anyone who has dabbled in 8mm film will tell you, there is a lot in the quality of a film digitizer, and it’s often worth paying for a professional job from someone aimed at the film-making world rather than you local photographic print booth. It would be interesting to take a look at this device, and see whether its quality is worth pursuing. After all, some of us have been known to dabble in 8mm film.