Retrogadgets: Oscilloscope Cameras

November 11, 2024 by Al Williams 23 Comments

Today, if you want to get a picture from your oscilloscope — maybe to send to a collaborator or to stick in a document or blog post — it is super easy. You can push an image to a USB stick or sometimes even just use the scope’s PC or web interface to save the picture directly to your computer. Of course, if it is on the computer, you could use normal screen capture software. But that hasn’t always been the case. Back in the days when scopes were heavy and expensive, if you wanted to capture an image from the tube, you took a picture. While you might be able to hold up your camera to the screen, they made specific cameras just for this purpose.

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Building A Sound Camera For Under $400

October 10, 2024 by Lewin Day 20 Comments

[Benn Jordan] had an idea. He’d heard of motion amplification technology, where cameras are used to capture tiny vibrations in machinery and then visually amplify it for engineering analysis. This is typically the preserve of high-end industrial equipment, but [Benn] wondered if it really had to be this way. Armed with a modern 4K smartphone camera and the right analysis techniques, could he visually capture sound?

The video first explores commercially available “acoustic cameras” which are primarily sold business-to-business at incredibly high prices. However, [Benn] suspected he could build something similar on the cheap. He started out with a 16-channel microphone that streams over USB for just $275, sourced from MiniDSP, and paired it with a Raspberry Pi 5 running the acoular framework for acoustic beamforming. Acoular analyses multichannel audio and visualizes them so you can locate sound sources. He added a 1080p camera, and soon enough, was able to overlay sound location data over the video stream. He was able to locate a hawk in a tree using this technique, which was pretty cool, and the total rig came in somewhere under $400.

The rest of the video covers other sound-camera techniques—vibration detection, the aforementioned motion amplification, and some neat biometric techniques. It turns out your webcam can probably detect your heart rate, for example.

It’s a great video that illuminates just what you can achieve with modern sound and video capture. Think SIGGRAPH-level stuff, but in a form you can digest over your lunchbreak. Video after the break.

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Shoot Smooth Video From Your Phone With The Syringe Slider

September 29, 2024 by Donald Papp 5 Comments

We love the idea [Btoretsukuru] shared that uses a simple setup called the Syringe Slider to take smoothly-tracked video footage of small scenes like model trains in action. The post is in Japanese, but the video is very much “show, don’t tell” and it’s perfectly clear how it all works. The results look fantastic!

The device consists of a frame that forms a sort of enclosed track in which one’s mobile phone can slide horizontally. The phone butts up against the plunger of an ordinary syringe built into the frame. As the phone is pushed along, it depresses the plunger which puts up enough resistance to turn the phone’s slide into a slow, even, and smooth glide. Want to fine-tune the resistance and therefore the performance? Simply attach different diameter tips to the syringe.

The results speak for themselves, and it’s a fantastically clever bit of work. There are plenty of DIY slider designs (some of which get amazingly complex) but they are rarely small things that can be easily gotten up close and personal with small subjects like mini train terrain.

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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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Help The LEGO Camera Become A Reality

August 15, 2024 by Jenny List 9 Comments

Some time over a year ago, we told you about a camera. Not just any camera, but a fully-functional 35mm film camera made entirely of LEGO, and with a pleasingly retro design into the bargain. It’s the work of [Zung92], and it can be found on the LEGO Ideas website.

You might now be asking why we’re talking about it again so soon, and the answer comes in its approaching the deadline for being considered by LEGO for a set. Projects on the Ideas website move forward when they achieve 10,000 supporters, and this one’s just shy of 8,000 with a month to go. We like this project and we think it deserves to see the light of day, and perhaps with your help it can.

When we covered this project last time we lamented the lack of technical detail, so we’re pleased to see a glimpse inside it as part of a manual uploaded to the updates page. We’d be the first to remark that with its LEGO part plastic lens and quarter-frame pictures it won’t be the best camera ever, but that’s hardly the point. Cameras like this one are a challenge, and it seems as though this one is perfect for the competition with a difference.

Hacking An IoT Camera Reveals Hard-Coded Root Password

July 24, 2024 by Dan Maloney 24 Comments

Hacking — at least the kind where you’re breaking into stuff — is very much a learn-by-doing skill. There’s simply no substitute for getting your hands dirty and just trying something. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn something by watching, with this root password exploit on a cheap IP video camera being a good look at the basics.

By way of background on this project, [Matt Brown] had previously torn into a VStarcam CB73 security camera, a more or less generic IP camera that he picked up on the cheap, and identified a flash memory chip from which he extracted the firmware. His initial goal was to see if the camera was contacting sketchy servers, and while searching the strings for the expected unsavory items, he found hard-coded IP addresses plus confirmation that the camera was running some Linux variant.

With evidence of sloppy coding practices, [Matt] set off on a search for a hard-coded root password. The second video covers this effort, which started with finding UART pins and getting a console session. Luckily, the bootloader wasn’t locked, which allowed [Matt] to force the camera to boot into a shell session and find the root password hash. With no luck brute-forcing the hash, he turned to Ghidra to understand the structure of a suspicious program in the firmware called encoder. After a little bit of poking and some endian twiddling, he was able to identify the hard-coded root password for every camera made by this outfit, and likely others as well.

Granted, the camera manufacturer made this a lot easier than it should have been, but with a lot of IoT stuff similarly afflicted by security as an afterthought, the skills on display here are probably broadly applicable. Kudos to [Matt] for the effort and the clear, concise presentation that makes us want to dig into the junk bin and get hacking.

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Hacking An IP Camera To Run Your Own Software

July 17, 2024 by Lewin Day 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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