DIY Pan And Tilt Camera Mount

August 23, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 2 Comments

Pan and tilt mounts have a number of uses that can increase the functionality of various types of cameras. Security cameras can use them to adjust the field of view remotely, astronomers can use them as telescope mounts to accurately track celestial objects, and of course photographers and videographers can use them to add dynamic elements to shots. But getting the slow, smooth, and reliable movement isn’t as simple as slapping some servos on a tripod. So unless you want to break the bank for a commercial mount, this DIY pan and tilt mount might be the way to go.

The mount is built largely out of 3D printed parts and a few fairly common motors, belts, pulleys, and bearings. The movements are controlled using stepper motors, and there are two additional systems built in so that focus and zoom can be controlled through the system as well. The software controlling it all is open-source and available on GitHub, and controls the mount remotely through a network connection. It’s also designed to use the readily-available ESP32 chip, making it overall fairly adaptable.

The system doesn’t slouch on features, either. It can move from one point to another with various programmable speeds, has a key sequencer for more complex movements, and can accommodate the needs of stop motion animators as well. It’s an impressive build that should be accessible to plenty of photographers with a 3D printer and the right parts, but photography and astronomy aren’t the only reasons to use a pan and tilt mount. Check out this one that brings some sunlight to a shaded room.

Improving A Kodak Film Digitizer

August 23, 2023 by Jenny List 10 Comments

Despite the near-complete collapse of its ecosystem in the face of portable videocassette camcorders in the 1980s, somehow the 8 mm format, smallest of the movie films, has survived the decades. There’s a special aura around an 8 mm image which electronic recordings don’t replicate, plus for film makers there’s an attraction to working with real film. Unsurprisingly almost all of the devices used with 8 mm film have ceased to be manufactured, but a few items escaped the cut. It’s still possible to buy an 8 mm digitizer for example, and it’s one of these with a Kodak brand that [Mac84] has. Unsatisfied with its image quality, he’s set about tinkering with its firmware to give it some video adjustment possibilities and remove its artifact-prone artificial sharpening.

Helped by the device having a handy EEPROM from which to extract the code, he was able to recover the firmware intact. From here on he was in luck, because the digitizer’s Novatek CPU is shared with some dash cams and this had spawned a hacker scene. From there he was able to find the relevant area and adjust those settings, and after a few false starts, re-flash it to the device.

The results can be seen in the video below the break, and perhaps reveal much about what we expect from an image in the digital age. The sharpened images look good, until we see untampered versions which are closer to the original.

If you don’t have a Kodak scanner you can always build one yourself, and meanwhile like many people we are still wondering what happened to that new Super 8 camera they announced in 2018 but never released.

Continue reading “Improving A Kodak Film Digitizer” →

SLR To DSLR Conversion Becomes Full Camera

August 22, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 8 Comments

At least as far as the inner workings are concerned, there’s not a whole lot of difference between an single-lens reflex (SLR) camera that uses film and a digital SLR (DSLR) camera that uses an electronic sensor except the method for capturing the image. So adding the digital image sensor to a formerly analog camera like this seemed like an interesting project for [Wenting Zhang]. But this camera ballooned a little further than that as he found himself instead building a complete, full-frame digital camera nearly from scratch.

The camera uses a full-frame design and even though the project originally began around the SLR mechanism, in the end [Wenting] decided not to keep this complex system in place. Instead, to keep the design simple and more accessible a mirrorless design is used with an electronic viewfinder system. It’s also passive M lens mount, meaning that plenty of manual lenses will be available for this camera without having to completely re-invent the wheel.

As far as the sensor goes, [Wenting] wanted something relatively user-friendly with datasheets available so he turned to industrial cameras to find something suitable, settling on a Kodak charge-coupled device (CCD) for the sensor paired with an i.MX processor. All of the electronics have publicly-available datasheets which is important for this open-source design. There’s a lot more work that went into this build than just picking parts and 3D printing a case, though, and we’d definitely recommend anyone interested to check out the video below for how this was all done. And, for those who want to go back to the beginnings of this project and take a different path, it’s definitely possible to convert an analog SLR to a digital one.

Continue reading “SLR To DSLR Conversion Becomes Full Camera” →

Low Res Arduino Thermal Camera

August 15, 2023 by Al Williams 10 Comments

Do you know how you see those cheap telescopes at the department store? The box has beautiful pictures that probably came from the Hubble. What you will see is somewhat different. You have to carefully look at [upir’s] Arduino thermal camera project because it intersperses pictures of what you expect an 8×8 sensor will produce with images produced by a much better camera.

The actual project — watch the video below — is undoubtedly neat. An inexpensive 8×8 IR sensor and an 8X8 LED panel join to form a crude but usable thermal camera.

Continue reading “Low Res Arduino Thermal Camera” →

A Digital Camera For The 1984 Market

August 14, 2023 by Jenny List 17 Comments

Digital cameras are a ubiquitous consumer and professional product here in 2023, and because of the wide availability of parts it’s relatively straightforward to construct one for yourself. Four decades ago though, film was king, but that hasn’t stopped [Georg Lukas] from building a digital camera for the 1984 market. The hardware is definitely from recent years, the extremely affordable ESP32-cam board that many of us will have worked with already. Meanwhile the 1984 part lies in the recording format, it makes EGA 16-colour low-res pictures and stores them in the archaic TGA file format.

A low-res camera is fun, but there are two other angles on this which are definitely worth some time. The first is that his description and code are worth a read for anyone with an interest in programming an ESP32 camera, while the second invites us to consider whether such a camera could have been made using parts available in 1984. We remember camera peripherals for 8-bit microcomputers which were a C-mount lens positioned over a decapped RAM chip, and thus we can’t help wondering whether an RGB split to three of those sensors could have been constructed. Whether a 6502 or a Z80 with 64k of memory could have processed the three images into one is another matter, but at least if any of you want to try there’s a handy 1984 computer still popping up on eBay.

A Game Boy Camera, Without The Game Boy

July 29, 2023 by Jenny List 3 Comments

We all know the Nintendo Game Boy camera peripheral, and we’ve seen plenty of hacks for it on these pages over the years. We like [Raphael Boichot]’s camera then, as instead of including a Game Boy or emulating one, it talks directly to the sensor from an RP2040. The result is a standalone camera with slightly better quality than the original, and with near-limitless storage and easy retrieval of pictures.

For us the interesting revelation from this project comes in the light it sheds on the sensor module, the Mitsubishi M64282FP, but it’s no slouch as a camera beside that. There are motion sensor and timelapse modes, as well the ability to take high dynamic range pictures, and as if that’s not enough it also has all the tweakable things you’d expect from a “proper” camera. The oldest adage in photography is that the best camera in the world is the one in your hand, and we’d say that this one’s better than a real Game Boy Camera should the once-in-a-lifetime picture come while you’re holding it.

Of course, a better Game Boy camera needs a better lens, right?

A Wigglegram Lens With Variable Aperture

July 27, 2023 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

Wigglegrams are those weird animated pictures you’ve seen that seem to generate a 3D-like effect. [scealux] had built lenses to take such pictures before, but wanted to take things to the next level. Enter the Wigglegram Lens, version 2.

In building a new lens for the Open Sauce ’23 event, [scealux] wanted to get variable aperture working, while also improving focus speed. The lens was also intended for use with a Sony A7R3. Unlike his previous effort, this lens would only work on the full-frame Sony FE mount cameras.

The lens uses a bevy of 3D printed parts, along with plastic lenses salvaged from old disposable cameras. When assembled, it takes three photos simultaneously on one single frame. They can then be reassembled into a Wigglegram by post-processing on a computer. The results are grainy and rough, but yet somehow compelling.

If you want to see [scealux]’s original build for Sony E-mount cameras, we covered it here. Video after the break.

Continue reading “A Wigglegram Lens With Variable Aperture” →