The Fig Rig is the brain child of director Mike Figgis. The Rig is designed to provide stability while using a handheld camera. If you’ve seen the continuous 90 minute takes in Figgis’s Timecode you know what prompted him to come up with this contraption. Like most digital video camera accessories the Rig comes with a premium price. KingVidiot has a forum post detailing his attempt at creating a homemade Fig Rig. He used an old steering wheel, a piece of aluminum plate and a wooden dowel. It isn’t that pretty to look at, but it definitely didn’t cost him $300 and it works pretty well too.

[thanks DVguru]

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Ben Heckendorn has been busy this holiday season. His latest project is cramming the guts of a Colecovision into a portable case. The project was commissioned, otherwise he probably wouldn’t have tackled it. The first bit of weirdness he found was the use of +12V, +5V, -5V lines to power the console. To get the board to fit in a smaller space he “flattened” it, remounting the components so they have a lower profile. The screen and case are standard issue Ben Heck, which he admits he can pretty much build with his eyes closed now. All told, it still looks great, but Ben says he isn’t going to be repeating this project any time soon because of the complexity involved.

[thanks HK-47]

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The small footprint of a CCD makes it hard for digital video cameras to emulate the short depth of field of film cameras. You’ll notice depth of field in movies when they have one actor close to the camera and you see the second actor over the shoulder; the actors will alternate being in focus because of the short depth of field. Here are some examples. To emulate this using a DV camera you have to change the size of the target area.  A smaller image is projected on a clear screen in front of the camera which is then recorded. This project uses a clear CD blank for the screen. The CD is rotated using an old CD player; otherwise the camera would pick up the grain of the plastic. Pretty easy, right? I haven’t even mentioned that the resulting image is upside down.

[thanks Angstrom]

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The JuiceBox is a personal video player that was sold by Mattel that no one cared about. It was capable of playing MP3s off of an SD card and this summer you could pick them up for cheap as retailers dumped their stocks. [prpplague] has been hard at work creating a custom bootable rom cartridge. The MP3 adapter is a simple pc board with a SD card holder attached to it. The card is modified so the JuiceBox believes it is a video cartridge. An xD memory card is then soldered onto the back to act as storage. Using the JTAG connection on the JuiceBox and a serial console you can flash the bootrom, kernel, and ram disk from the SD card onto the xD. Once flashed the new custom cartridge will work on any JuiceBox. [prpplague] is still cleaning up the flash code, but it should be ready to go shortly.

Continue reading “JuiceBox Custom Linux Cart” →

A few people sent this in, but credit goes to [chris tt] for providing all the necessary links. Here is the process for using the camera with windows. First you need to build a USB cable [pdf]. Next, plug in the camera and create an inf file using libUSB. Finally, grab the OPS program and start extracting the video. Here is the thread announcing the release. Congratulations to BillW, morcheeba, daBass and anyone else who helped contribute to the project.

UPDATE: MAKE:Blog has a chronology of how this latest development happened.

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Yes, this has been covered heavily. Not nearly enough noise has been made about how easy hacking this device is. Nokia has opened up almost everything even placing the graphics under a Creative Commons license. Nokia has also constructed a firm foundation to develop on. Underneath everything is a Debian based system with a 2.6.11 kernel. Debian is one of the largest binary distributions mainly because of its apt package management system. Apt will make it really easy to get new software and keep the installed software updated. A modern kernel means the device will be able to keep up with developing technologies like bluetooth and usb. The next layer is an Xserver. This is not a pda and Nokia has decided not to use technologies like Qtopia or Opie for  the application layer. This will make porting graphical apps much easier and with the addition of Gtk they will also have a consistent look. If you’re worried about the ARM processor support, just check out all of the programs that people ported for the Zaurus.

The best news for you is that Nokia has set up a comprehensive development site. It describes the underlying software layers and how to set up the development environment to emulate the device. It even has a walkthrough for how to port applications to the device. As an example they show how to port Gaim, which is funny because most places have reported that IM support won’t be released until 2006. If Nokia does a good job building in support for Microsoft htpcs, iTunes control, and Tivo control I think this device will be certain to take off. I’d like to see someone make an electronic programming guide that you could use to change the channels on the tv and schedule recordings instead of the intrusive on-screen-displays used by most cable boxes. If anything it will be nice to hang out on the couch reading news and ebooks without having to use my genital scorching Dell.

Continue reading “Nokia 770 SDK” →