Your Fuji Digital Camera Is Hackable

April 8, 2023 by Jenny List 9 Comments

There was a time when a digital camera was a surprisingly simple affair whose on-board processor didn’t have much in the way of smarts beyond what was needed to grab an image from the sensor and compress it onto some storage. But as they gained more features, over time cameras acquired all the trappings of a fully-fledged computer in their own right, including full-fat operating systems and the accompanying hackability opportunities.

Prominent among camera manufacturers are Fujifilm, whose cameras it turns out have plenty of hacking possibilities. There’s something of a community about them, with all their work appearing in a GitHub repository, and a cracking April Fool in which a Fujifilm camera appears able to be coaxed into running DOOM.

Correction: We’ve since heard from creator [Daniel] who assures us that not only was the DOOM hack very much real, but that he’s released the instructions on how to run the classic shooter on your own Fujfilm X-A2.

Fujifilm cameras past 2017 or so run the ThreadX real-time operating system on a variety of ARM SoCs, with an SQLite data store for camera settings and some custom software controlling the camera hardware. The hackability comes through patching firmware updates, and aside from manipulating the built-in scripting language and accessing the SQLite database, can include code execution.

Don’t have a Fujifilm? They’re not the only hackable camera to be found.

Reviving A Legend: Mamiya RB67 Repair

April 6, 2023 by Maya Posch 26 Comments

The damaged parts in the camera are circled in red. Original graphic is from the Mamiya service manual.

When it comes to professional medium format analog cameras, the Mamiya RB67 is among the most well-known and loved, ever since its introduction in 1970. Featuring not only support for 120 and 220 film options, but also a folding and ‘chimney’ style view finder and a highly modular body, these are just some reasons that have made it into a popular – if costly – reflex system camera even today. This is one reason why [Anthony Kouttron] chose to purchase and attempt to repair a broken camera, in the hopes of not only saving a lot of money, but also to save one of those amazing cameras from the scrap heap. Continue reading “Reviving A Legend: Mamiya RB67 Repair” →

Glowscope Reduces Microscope Cost By Orders Of Magnitude

March 24, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 15 Comments

As smartphones become more ubiquitous in society, they are being used in plenty of ways not imaginable even ten or fifteen years ago. Using its sensors to gather LIDAR information, its GPS to get directions, its microphone to instantly translate languages, or even use its WiFi and cellular radios to establish a wireless hotspot are all things which would have taken specialized hardware not more than two decades ago. The latest disruption may be in microscopy, as this build demonstrates a microscope that would otherwise be hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The microscope is a specialized device known as a fluorescence microscope, which uses a light source to excite fluorescent molecules in a sample which can illuminate structures that would otherwise be invisible under a regular microscope. For this build, the light is provided by readily-available LED lighting as well as optical filters typically used in stage lighting, as well as a garden-variety smartphone. With these techniques a microscope can be produced for around $50 USD that has 10 µm resolution.

While these fluorescence microscopes do have some limitations compared to units in the hundred-thousand-dollar range, perhaps unsurprisingly, they are fairly impressive for such a low-cost alternative. More details about these builds can also be found in their research paper published in Nature. Even without the need for fluorescence microscopy, a smartphone has been shown to be a fairly decent optical microscope, provided you have the right hardware to supplement the phone’s camera.

Pocket-Sized Thermal Imager

March 14, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 25 Comments

Just as the gold standard for multimeters and other instrumentation likely comes in a yellow package of some sort, there is a similar household name for thermal imaging. But, if they’re known for anything other than the highest quality thermal cameras, it’s excessively high price. There are other options around but if you want to make sure that the finished product has some sort of quality control you might want to consider building your own thermal imaging device like [Ruslan] has done here.

The pocket-sized thermal camera is built around a MLX90640 sensor from Melexis which can be obtained on its own, but can also be paired with an STM32F446 board with a USB connection in order to easily connect it to a computer. For that, [Ruslan] paired it with an ESP32 board with a companion screen, so that the entire package could be assembled together with a battery and still maintain its sleek shape. The data coming from the thermal imagining sensor does need some post-processing in order to display useful images, but this is well within the capabilities of the STM32 and ESP32.

With an operating time on battery of over eight hours and a weight under 100 grams, this could be just the thing for someone looking for a thermal camera who doesn’t want to give up an arm and a leg to one of the industry giants. If you’re looking for something even simpler, we’ve seen a thermal camera based on a Raspberry Pi that delivers its images over the network instead of on its own screen.

AI And Savvy Marketing Create Dubious Moon Photos

March 13, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 48 Comments

Taking a high-resolution photo of the moon is a surprisingly difficult task. Not only is a long enough lens required, but the camera typically needs to be mounted on a tracking system of some kind, as the moon moves too fast for the long exposure times needed. That’s why plenty were skeptical of Samsung’s claims that their latest smart phone cameras could actually photograph this celestial body with any degree of detail. It turns out that this skepticism might be warranted.

Samsung’s marketing department is claiming that this phone is using artificial intelligence to improve photos, which should quickly raise a red flag for anyone technically minded. [ibreakphotos] wanted to put this to the test rather than speculate, so a high-resolution image of the moon was modified in such a way that most of the fine detail of the image was lost. Displaying this image on a monitor, standing across the room, and using the smartphone in question reveals details in the image that can’t possibly be there.

The image that accompanies this post shows the two images side-by-side for those skeptical of these claims, but from what we can tell it looks like this is essentially an AI system copy-pasting the moon into images it thinks are of the moon itself. The AI also seems to need something more moon-like than a ping pong ball to trigger the detail overlay too, as other tests appear to debunk a more simplified overlay theory. It seems like using this system, though, is doing about the same thing that this AI camera does to take pictures of various common objects.

Measuring A Millisecond Mechanically

March 9, 2023 by Al Williams 23 Comments

If you are manufacturing something, you have to test it. It wouldn’t do, for example, for your car to say it was going 60 MPH when it was really going 90 MPH. But if you were making a classic Leica camera back in the early 20th century, how do you measure a shutter that operates at 1/1000 of a second — a millisecond — without modern electronics? The answer is a special stroboscope that would look at home in any cyberpunk novel. [SmarterEveryDay] visited a camera restoration operation in Finland, and you can see the machine in action in the video below.

The machine has a wheel that rotates at a fixed speed. By imaging a pattern through the camera, you can determine the shutter speed. The video shows a high-speed video of the shutter operation which is worth watching, and it also explains exactly how the rotating disk combined with the rotating shutter allows the measurement. Continue reading “Measuring A Millisecond Mechanically” →

New Raspberry Pi Camera With Global Shutter

March 9, 2023 by Elliot Williams 37 Comments

Raspberry Pi has just introduced a new camera module in the high-quality camera format. For the same $50 price you would shell out for the HQ camera, you get roughly eight times fewer pixels. But this is a global shutter camera, and if you need a global shutter, there’s just no substitute. That’s a big deal for the Raspberry Pi ecosystem.

Global vs Rolling

Most cameras out there today use CMOS sensors in rolling shutter mode. That means that the sensor starts in the upper left corner and rasters along, reading out exposure values from each row before moving down to the next row, and then starting up at the top again. The benefit is simpler CMOS design, but the downside is that none of the pixels are exposed or read at the same instant.

Continue reading “New Raspberry Pi Camera With Global Shutter” →