An open-source, DIY, point-and-shoot digital camera.

PolyShot Camera Focuses On Nostalgia

August 18, 2026 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

Although we personally have yet to see anyone brandishing an old digital point-and-shoot camera, we hear they’re back in vogue. Why, though? People are nostalgic for that image quality. While he certainly could have simply picked up a vintage model somewhere for a likely inflated price, [Arnov Sharma] decided to build his own version and call it the PolyShot.

The core of this project is the Unihiker K10 dev board, which uses an ESP32-S3, a whopping 2 megapixel camera, and a micro SD card to capture photos and display them back on the screen. The tricky part, if you can call it that, is the custom PCB. It’s a simple board with just three buttons: shutter, gallery, and next image. We do like that the position of the battery compartment creates a nice grip.

The biggest difference here is that there is a few-second delay between pressing the shutter button and actually capturing the image, which you can see in the short videos below. So if you’re trying to get a shot of a skink or something equally speedy, we wish you good luck.

In a future iteration, [Arnov] wants to address the issue of image quality, because this project ended up evolving into a more traditional digital camera. He would also improve the battery life, for which the current expectancy is around three hours on a charge. Ultimately, [Arnov] wants to ditch the Unihiker and design everything from the ground up, using an ESP32-S3 module.

Continue reading “PolyShot Camera Focuses On Nostalgia” →

So, You Want To Fix An Old Camera

August 18, 2026 by Jenny List 14 Comments

Old cameras are a fantastic way to experiment with photography, and outside a few brands, they can be an inexpensive way too. It’s easy to find older cameras in a broken condition for a lot less money, but if you’re tempted to fix one then [enthdegree] has some advice for you.

It’s ostensibly a set of notes on the disassembly and repair of a Nikon F100 35mm film SLR, but along the way it’s full of useful tips and tricks for camera disassembly. he materials you’ll need, advice on not losing screws is one, and warnings against disassembling too much is another. It’s all the stuff he wished he’d known before starting, and now you can know it too.

Fixing up old cameras in this way is rewarding, and something we’ve certainly been known to do ourselves. But it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s not for the faint-hearted, and with decades of old film cameras sitting unused, often a working example might make more sense.

Neural Net Reads The Gas Meter

July 21, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 25 Comments

In an ideal world, the role of technology would be to make all of our lives easier. And although all the ads suddenly appearing in our smart TVs and gaming systems might make it seem otherwise, some technology can still improve our lives if we work hard at it. For [Cian], that meant training a neural network to read his gas meter so he wouldn’t have to do it himself.

The root issue here is twofold, first that [Cian]’s gas company hasn’t upgraded their own technology to modern, remote-readable meters, and second that the meter can’t be read by a gas employee because it’s hidden in the depths of [Cian]’s basement. This latter fact requires him to delve into Moria-like depths to get to the meter, so the solution here was to place a Raspberry Pi in this location instead. With a camera pointed at the meter, it’s not quite capable of discerning digits on its own so a neural network was trained in order to get accurate readings of the dial. And, finally, since the machine is networked already [Cian] set it up to automatically notify the gas company of its reading so he is now completely out of the loop.

For automating tedious tasks like these, the Raspberry Pi with something like OpenCV as a computer vision tool is a fairly mature platform for light machine learning duties like these. We’ve seen license plate readers as well as neighborhood traffic surveys built on these platforms to help automate human labor away, making our lives easier one single-board computer at a time.

Continue reading “Neural Net Reads The Gas Meter” →

Hackaday Europe 2026: Project Gigapixel

July 20, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 10 Comments

There was once a race to put out cameras with ever higher numbers of megapixels to snare customers eager to take the highest quality digital photos. These days, we know that things like optics, processing, and finer qualities of an image sensor are all very important beyond pure resolution. But, for a time, companies behaved as if megapixels mattered over all else.

But what if you could go farther—shooting not millions, but billions of pixels in a single image? That’s precisely what [Yannick Richter] came to Hackaday Europe to talk about, covering his Project Gigapixel build.

Continue reading “Hackaday Europe 2026: Project Gigapixel” →

Binaural Microphone On A Budget

May 10, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 26 Comments

For as many speakers as someone can cram into a surround sound system, humans still (generally) only have two ears to listen to those sounds with. This means that, for recording purposes, it’s possible to create incredibly vivid three-dimensional sounds with just two microphones, provided that there’s an actual physical replica of a human ear attached to each microphone. This helps ensure that all the qualities of the sounds are preserved in a way a real human would experience them, and as [David Green] demonstrates, these systems don’t need to be very expensive.

This build doesn’t just use models of human ears for recording sounds through. The silicone ears are mounted on a styrofoam mannequin head as well, which provides some sound isolation between the two microphones, much like a real human head. The ears are mounted in appropriate locations with the microphones installed inside, and the entire microphone apparatus is positioned on a PVC rig with a camera so that binaural audio will be recorded for anything [David] points it at.

Although he had some issues interfacing two microphones using 19th-century technology instead of soldering everything together, the build still eventually came together, and only for around $70 USD. However, this build is a bit dated now, so prices may have changed by now. It’s still a great way to produce realistic stereo sound without breaking the bank, but it’s not the only way of getting this job done.

Continue reading “Binaural Microphone On A Budget” →

A Raspberry Pi-powered glitch camera, with adjustable glitch.

Easy-ish Glitch Camera? There’s A Pi 4 That

May 8, 2026 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

Usually, when you want to make glitchy images with lots of colors and things, you have to poke around inside a camera and successfully circuit-bend the thing without bricking it. But [sharkbiscuit101] proves that this isn’t necessary, provided you have a Raspberry Pi 4 and a few other components.

Now we don’t have a lot of detail here, but [sharkbiscuit101] is being heavily encouraged to share the relevant files and a component list. What we do know is that the there’s a screen for previewing images, a portable battery, a shutter button, a rotary encoder to dial in the weirdness, and a game pad for controls. Using the script and a slider, you can tweak different aspects of the image to basically break it down in real time. If you find a nifty combination, you can use the rotary encoder to save and then recall presets.

If you’re wondering about the grip, that’s a Sharge battery from the Bezos Barn. Per [sharkbiscuit101], it is a good size, and since Pi 4 doesn’t have a power button, it can be turned on and off at the battery.

Of course, you can always mess with JPGs on a raw, textual level instead, or produce standard photographs with a pinhole camera.

Camera Slider: Build Instead Of Buy Goes Awry

May 4, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 1 Comment

[TheHyperFix] had a problem. He’d spied a brilliant camera slider, but didn’t want to lay out big money to acquire it. The natural solution? Build one! Only, life is seldom so straightforward.

The plan was straightforward – take an old broken 3D printer, and repurpose its parts to make a camera slider instead. The build started with a aluminium extrusion, some V-slot wheels, and a 3D printed platform to hold the camera. Moving the platform was done via a belt drive, using the stepper motors and some software to tell the original printer controller what to do.

Unfortunately, the early experiments failed when the controller blew up under load. An Arduino was subbed in with a CNC shield, which got things back on track, and [TheHyperFix] had a somewhat functional slider with relatively jerky movement. A tough iterative design process ensued to work out problems with bearings and the Arduino’s pulse limit, among others.

As it stands, the slider is semi-functional, but it’s not quite well behaved enough to use for professional shooting. Still, for a first attempt at electronics prototyping, we think [TheHyperFix] did a pretty solid job. It might not be all there yet, but it’s well on the way, and a great deal was learned in the process.

If you’re trying to build a camera slider in a hurry, you might like to try recreating one of the builds we’ve featured before. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Camera Slider: Build Instead Of Buy Goes Awry” →