[Ben Krasnow] Looks Inside Film Camera Date Stamping

October 15, 2019 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

Honestly, we never wondered how those old film cameras used to put the date stamp in the lower right-hand corner of the frame. Luckily, [Ben Krasnow] does not suffer from this deplorable lack of curiosity, and his video teardown of a date-stamping film camera back (embedded below) not only answers the question, but provides a useful lesson in value engineering.

For the likely fair fraction of the audience who has never taken a photo on film before, cheap 35-mm cameras were once a big thing. They were really all one had for family snapshots and the like unless you wanted to invest in single-lens reflex cameras and all the lenses and accessories. They were miles better than earlier cartridge cameras like the 110 or – shudder – Disc film, and the cameras started getting some neat electronic features too. One was the little red-orange date stamp, which from the color we – and [Ben] assumed was some sort of LED pressed up against the film, but it ends up being much cooler than that.

Digging into the back of an old camera, [Ben] found that there’s actually a tiny projector that uses a mirror to fold the optical path between the film and a grain-of-wheat incandescent bulb. An LCD filter sits in the optical path, but because it’s not exactly on the plane of the film, it actually has to project the image onto the film. The incandescent bulb acts as a point source and the mirror makes the optical path long enough that the date stamp image appears sharp on the film. It’s cheap, readily adapted to other cameras, and reliable.

Teardowns like this aren’t fodder for [Ben]’s usual video fare, which tends more toward homemade CT scanners and Apollo-grade electroluminescent displays, but this was informative and interesting, too.

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Modular Camera Remote Is Highly Capable

October 4, 2019 by Lewin Day No comments

Many cameras these days have optional remotes that allow the shutter release to be triggered wirelessly. Despite this, [Foaly] desired more range, and more options for dealing with several cameras at once. As you’d expect, hacking ensued.

[Foaly] uses Silver modules to photograph rocket launches safely.

The system goes by the name of Silver, and is modular in nature. Each Silver module packs a transmitter and receiver, and can send and receive trigger orders to any other module in range. This allows a module to be used to trigger a camera, or be used as a remote to control other modules. There’s even a PC interface program that controls modules over USB.

Modules are also capable of sharing configuration changes with other modules in the field, making it easy to control a large battery of cameras without having to manually run around changing settings on each one. Oh, and it can run as a basic intervalometer too.

LoRa is used for wireless communications between modules, giving them excellent range. [Foaly] successfully used the remotes at ranges over 500 meters without any dropouts, capturing some great model rocket takeoffs in the process.

Silver is a highly robust project that should do everything the average photographer could ever possibly need, and probably a good deal more. Firmware and board files are available for those eager to make their own.

We’ve seen several very impressive camera augmentations entered into the 2019 Hackaday Prize, from ultra high-speed LED flash modules to highly flexible automatic trigger systems.

Alternative Photography Hack Chat

September 30, 2019 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, October 2 at noon Pacific for the Alternative Photography Hack Chat with Pierre-Loup Martin!

It seems like the physics of silicon long ago replaced the chemistry of silver as the primary means of creating photographs, to the point where few of us even have film cameras anymore, and home darkrooms are a relic of the deep past. Nobody doubts that the ability to snap a quick photo or even to create a work of photographic genius with a tiny device that fits in your pocket is a wonder of the world, but still, digital photographs can lack some of the soul of film photography.

Recapturing the look of old school photography is a passion for a relatively small group of dedicated photographers, who ply their craft with equipment and chemistries that haven’t been in widespread use for a hundred years. The tools of this specialty trade are hard to come by commercially, so practitioners of alternate photographic processes are by definition hackers, making current equipment bend to the old ways. Pierre-Loup is one such artist, working with collodion plates, hacked large-format cameras, pinholes camera, and chemicals and processes galore – anything that lets him capture a unique image. His photographs are eerie, with analog imperfections that Photoshop would have a hard time creating.

Join us as Pierre-Loup takes us on a tour through the world of alternative photography. We’ll look at the different chemistries used in alternative photography, the reasons why anyone would want to try it, and the equipment needed to pull it off. Photography was always a hack, until it wasn’t; Pierre-Loup will show us how he’s trying to put some soul back into it.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, October 2 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Hackaday Links: September 22, 2019

September 22, 2019 by Dan Maloney 45 Comments

Of all the stories we’d expect to hit our little corner of the world, we never thought that the seedy doings of a now-deceased accused pedophile billionaire would have impacted the intellectual home of the open-source software movement. But it did, and this week Richard Stallman resigned from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, as well as from the Free Software Foundation, which he founded and served as president. The resignations, which Stallman claims were “due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations”, followed the disclosure of a string of emails where he perhaps unwisely discussed what does and does not constitute sexual assault. The emails were written as a response to protests by MIT faculty and students outraged over the university’s long and deep relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the late alleged pedophile-financier. This may be one of those stories where the less said, the better. If only Stallman had heeded that advice.

They may be the radio stations with the worst programming ever, but then again, the world’s atomic clock broadcasting stations can really keep a beat. One of the oldest of these stations, WWV, is turning 100 this year, and will be adding special messages to its usual fare of beeps and BCD-encoded time signals on a 100-Hz subcarrier. If you tune to WWV at 10 past the hour (or 50 minutes past the hour for WWVH, the time station located in Hawaii) you’ll hear a special announcement. There was also talk of an open house at the National Institute of Standards and Technology complete with a WWV birthday cake, but that has since been limited to 100 attendees who pre-registered.

For the machinists and wannabes out there, the Internet’s machine shop channels all pitched in this week on something called #tipblitz19, where everyone with a lathe or mill posted a short video of their favorite shop tip. There’s a ton of great tip out there now, with the likes of This Old Tony, Abom79, Stefan Gotteswinter, and even our own Quinn Dunki contributing timesaving – and finger saving – tips. Don’t stop there though – there’s a playlist with 77 videos at last count, many of them by smaller channels that should be getting more love. Check them out and then start making chips.

Most of us know that DLP chips, which lie behind the lens of the projectors that lull us to sleep in conference rooms with their white noise and warm exhaust, are a series of tiny mirrors that wiggle around to project images. But have you ever seen them work? Now you can: Huygens Optics has posted a fascinating video deep-dive into the workings of digital light processors. With a stroboscopic camera and a lot of fussy work, the video reveals the microscopic movements of these mirrors and how that syncs up with the rotation of a color filter wheel. It’s really fascinating stuff, and hats off to Huygens for pulling off the setup needed to capture this.

And speaking of tiny optics, get a load of these minuscule digital cameras, aptly described by tipster David Gustafik as “disturbingly small.” We know we shouldn’t be amazed by things like this anymore, but c’mon – they’re ridiculously tiny! According to the datasheet, the smaller one will occupy 1 mm² on a PCB; the larger stereo camera requires 2.2 mm². Dubbed NanEye, the diminutive cameras are aimed at the medical market – think endoscopy – and at wearables manufacturers. These would be a lot of fun to play with – just don’t drop one.

Pan And Tilt To A New 3D Printed Business Model

September 11, 2019 by Kerry Scharfglass 11 Comments

When shooting video, an easy way to get buttery smooth panning and tracking is to use a mechanical device like a rail to literally slide the camera side to side. These range from what is essentially a skateboard to incredible programmable multi-axis industrial robots, a wide variety of which have been visible in the backgrounds of Youtuber’s sets for years. But even the “low end” devices can run hundreds of dollars (all that anodized aluminum doesn’t come cheap!). Edelkrone has been building lust worthy professional (read, pricey) motion setups for a decade. But in the last year they’ve started something pretty unusual; lowering prices with their Ortak series of 3D printed equipment. But this time, you do the printing.

In the FlexTILT Head 3D, everything in red is printed at home

Since the RepRap we’ve been excited about the future of democratized at home manufacturing, but to a large extent that dream hasn’t materialized. Printers are much more useful now than in the early days but you can’t buy a new mug from Starbucks and print it at home. But maybe that’s changing with Edelkrone’s offering.

When you buy an Ortak product you get one thing: all the fasteners and hardware. So the final product is more durable and appears more finished than what would pop out of your Prusa unaided. What about the rest of the device? That’s free. Seriously. Edelkrone freely provides STLs (including print setting recommendations) with detailed step-by-step assembly instructions and videos (sample after the break). Nice hack to avoid piracy, isn’t it?

Why choose the do-it-at-home style product? A significant price reduction of course! The Ortak line currently includes two products, the FlexTILT head you see above, and a skateboard-style slide called the SKATER 3D. Both of these were sold fully finished before making it to the DIY scene. The FlexTILT Head 2 comes in at $149 when you buy it whole. And when the PocketSKATER 2 was for sale, it included a FlexTILT Head and came to $249. Now? Each hardware kit is just $29.

So is this it? Have we hit the artisanal DIY micro-manufactured utopian dream? Not yet, but maybe we’re a little closer. Edelkrone is a real company which is really selling these as products, right there on their website along with everything else. They refer to it as “co-manufacturing” which we think is a clever name, and talk about expanding the program to include electronics. We can’t wait to see how the experiment goes!

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A Teeny Tiny 3D Printed Macro Extension Tube

September 4, 2019 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

When you hear the term “extension tube”, you probably think of something fairly long, right? But when [Loudifier] needed an extension tube to do extreme close-ups with a wide-angle lens on a Canon EF-M camera, it needed to be small…really small. The final 3D printed extension provides an adjustable length between 0 and 10 millimeters.

But it’s not just an extension tube, that would be too easy. According to [Loudifier], the ideal extension distance would be somewhere around 3 mm, but unfortunately the mounting bayonet for an EF-M lens is a little over 5 mm. To get around this, the extension tube also adapts to an EF/EF-S lens, which has a shorter mount and allows bringing it in closer than would be physically possible under otherwise.

[Loudifier] says the addition of electrical connections between the camera and the lens (for functions like auto focus) would be ideal, but the logistics of pulling that off are a bit daunting. For now, the most reasonable upgrades on the horizon are the addition of some colored dots on the outside to help align the camera, adapter, and lens. As the STLs and Fusion design file are released under the Creative Commons, perhaps the community will even take on the challenge of adapting it to other lens types.

For the polar opposite of this project, check out the 300 mm long 3D printed extension tube we covered a few weeks back that inspired [Loudifier] to send this project our way.

FiberGrid: An Inexpensive Optical Sensor Framework

August 30, 2019 by Ben James 21 Comments

When building robots, or indeed other complex mechanical systems, it’s often the case that more and more limit switches, light gates and sensors are amassed as the project evolves. Each addition brings more IO pin usage, cost, potentially new interfacing requirements and accompanying microcontrollers or ADCs. If you don’t have much electronics experience, that’s not ideal. With this in mind, for a Hackaday prize entry [rand3289] is working on FiberGrid, a clever shortcut for interfacing multiple sensors without complex hardware. It doesn’t completely solve the problems above, but it aims to be a cheap, foolproof way to easily add sensors with minimal hardware needed.

The idea is simple: make your sensors from light gates using fiber optics, feed the ends of the plastic fibers into a grid, then film the grid with a camera. After calibrating the software, built with OpenCV, you can “sample” the sensors through a neat abstraction layer. This approach is easier and cheaper than you might think and makes it very easy to add new sensors.

Naturally, it’s not fantastic for sample rates, unless you want to splash out on a fancy high-framerate camera, and even then you likely have to rely on an OS being able to process the frames in time. It’s also not very compact, but fortunately you can connect quite a few sensors to one camera – up to 216 in [rand3289]’s prototype.

There are many novel uses for this kind of setup, for example, rotation sensors made with polarising filters. We’ve even written about optical flex sensors before.