10,000-Year-Old Camera Lens Takes Striking Pictures

October 25, 2018 by Bryan Cockfield 46 Comments

The first photograph was taken sometime in the early 1800s, and through almost two centuries of development we’ve advanced through black-and-white, the video camera, and even high-speed cameras that can take thousands of frames per second. [Mathieu Stern] took a step back from all of the technological progress of the past two hundred years, though, and found a lens for his camera hidden in the glacial ice of Iceland.

Ice in this part of the world has been purified over the course of 10,000 years, and [Mathieu] realized that with this purity the ice could be formed into a workable camera lens. The first step was to get something that could actually form the ice into the proper shape, and for that he used a modified ice ball maker that was shaped to make a lens rather than a sphere. Next, he needed an enclosure to hold the lens and attach it to his camera, which he made using a 3D printer.

For this build, the hardest part probably wasn’t making the actual equipment, but rather getting to the right place in Iceland and actually making the lenses. At room temperature the lenses could be made in around five minutes, but in Iceland it took almost 45 minutes and the first four attempts broke. The fifth one was a charm though, so after over five hours on the beach he was finally able to make some striking images with the 10,000-year-old ice lens which melted after only a minute of use. If that seems like too much work, though, you can always outfit your camera with no lens at all.

Thanks to [baldpower] for the tip!

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Camera Obscura On Wheels Hits The Open Road

October 24, 2018 by Lewin Day 19 Comments

A camera obscura is a very simple device. Consisting of a dark chamber, with only a pinhole to let light in, it focuses an image on its inside surface. If you want to take a permanent copy, it’s as simple as installing a photosensitive film inside and managing the exposure time. Sounds like a normal camera, right? The difference is the scale — a camera obscura is large enough that humans can stand inside and view the image. Usually, they are large stationary rooms. [Physics Girl] took the show on the road by building a camera obscura out of a rented box truck.

The optics of the camera obscura project an image upside-down.

The basic concept is a great one – hire a box truck, and cover the rear opening with cardboard. Cut a small hole in the cardboard, and you’ve created a camera obscura on wheels. The video does a great job of explaining the optical principles behind what’s happening, and there’s even experimentation around how to change the exposure level and focus through modification of the aperture.

The only downside to viewing a camera obscura on video is that you can’t appreciate the resolution and detail visible in real life. Trust us though, it’s better than any HDTV on the market today.

The rolling camera obscura makes for a great experiment which requires little more than some cardboard, tape, and a sunny day. It would be great fun to execute as an educational activity at a school or makerspace. Once you’ve tackled that, perhaps consider the digital version. Video after the break.

[Thanks to Baldpower for the tip!]

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You Should Not Try These Taser NERF Darts

October 12, 2018 by Bryan Cockfield 23 Comments

For most of us, a good part of our childhood involved running around someone’s backyard (or inside the house) trying to score hits with a toy NERF gun. The fun level was high and the risk of personal injury was low. Now that we’re all mostly adults, it’s probably time to take our NERF game to the next level with some risk of serious personal harm.

In an effort to help his brother get back at him for being somewhat of a bully in their youth, [Allen Pan] gifted him with an upgraded NERF gun. Specifically, one with darts that pack a punch. Each of the “Elite” darts was equipped with a 300 V capacitor packed into the interior of the dart. New tips were 3D printed with special metal tips that allow the capacitor to discharge upon impact.

Besides the danger, there’s a good bit of science involved. Parts were scavenged from a new (and surprisingly expensive) disposable camera, and a customized circuit was constructed around the barrel of the dart gun that allows the darts to charge up when they’re loaded. It’s an impressive build that would be relatively simple to reconstruct for yourself, but it’s probably not the worst thing we’ve seen done with high voltage and a few small capacitors.

Thanks to [Itay] for the tip!

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Camera Uses Algorithms Instead Of Lenses

September 15, 2018 by Al Williams 21 Comments

A normal camera uses a lens to bend light so that it hits a sensor. A pinhole camera doesn’t have a lens, but the tiny hole serves the same function. Now two researchers from the University of Utah. have used software to recreate images from scattered unfocused light. The quality isn’t great, but there’s no lens — not even a pinhole — involved. You can see a video, below.

The camera has a sensor on the edge of a piece of a transparent window. The images could resolve .1 line-pairs/mm at a distance of 150 mm and had a depth of field of about 10 mm. This may seem like a solution that needs a problem, but think about the applications where a camera could see through a windshield or a pair of glasses without having a conventional camera in the way.

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Disassembling Mouse Sensors For Tracking Tongues

September 11, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

We just wrapped up the Human Computer Interface challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize, and with that comes a bevy of interesting new designs for mice and keyboards that push the envelope of what you think should be possible, using components that seem improbable. One of the best examples of this is The Bit, a project from [oneohm]. It’s a computer mouse, that uses a tiny little trackpad in ways you never thought possible. It’s a mouse that fits on your tongue.

The idea behind The Bit was to create an input device for people with limited use of their extremities. It’s a bit like the Eyedriveomatic, the winner from the 2015 Hackaday Prize, but designed entirely to fit on the tip of your tongue.

The first experiments on a tongue-controlled mouse were done with an optical trackpad/navigation button found on Blackberry Phones. Like all mouse sensors these days, these modules are actually tiny, really crappy cameras. [oneohm] picked up a pair of these modules and found they had completely different internal tracking modules, so the experiment turned to a surface tracking module from PixArt Imaging that’s also used as a filament sensor in the Prusa 3D printer. This module was easily connected to a microcontroller, and with careful application of plastics, was imbedded in a pacifier. Yes, it tracks a tongue and turns that into cursor movements. It’s a tongue-tracking mouse, and it works.

This is an awesome project for the Hackaday Prize. Not only does it bring new tech to a human-computer interface, it’s doing it in a way that’s accessible to all.

Guardin, Guarding The Garden: Turn Raspberry Pi Into A 3rd Eye

August 23, 2018 by Jenny List 16 Comments

If you are a gardener, you’ll know only too well the distress of seeing your hard work turned into a free lunch for passing herbivorous wildlife. It’s something that has evidently vexed [Jim], because he’s come up with an automated Raspberry Pi-controlled turret to seek out invading deer, and in his words: “Persuade them to munch elsewhere”.

Before you groan and sigh that here’s yet another pan and tilt camera, let us reassure you that this one is a little bit special. For a start, it rotates upon a set of slip rings rather than an untidy mess of twisted cables, so it can perfom 360 degree rotations at will, then it has a rather well-designed tilting cage for its payload. The write-up is rather functional but worth persevering with, and he’s posted a YouTube video that we’ve placed below the break.

This is a project that still has some way to go, for example just how those pesky deer are to be sent packing isn’t made entirely clear, but we think it already shows enough potential to be worthy of a second look. The slip ring mechanism in particular could find a home in many other projects.

It’s worth reminding readers that while pan and tilt mechanisms can be as impressive as this one, sometimes they are a little more basic.

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Feast Your Eyeballs On This Mechanical Eyeball

August 4, 2018 by Jenny List 1 Comment

Most of us, if we have bought a single board computer with the capability to support a camera, will have succumbed to temptation and shelled out for that peripheral in the hope that we can coax our new toy into having sight. We’ll have played with the command line tool and taken a few random images of our bench, but then what? There is so much possibility in a camera that our colleague [Steven Dufresne] wanted to explore with his Raspberry Pi, so he built a motorised eyeball mount with which to do so.

Pan & tilt mounts using RC servos are nothing especially new, but in this one he’s put some design effort that maybe some of the others lack. A lot of effort has gone in to ensuring no interference between the two axes, and in a slightly macabre twist until you remember it’s a model he’s talking about, the unit has been designed to fit inside a human head.

The servos are driven from the Pi using a servo driver board he’s discussed in another video, so once he’s described the assembly with a few design tweaks thrown in he has a quick look at the software demo he’s written emulating neurons for eye tracking. He promises that will be put up somewhere for download in due course.

If you’re in the market for a pan & tilt mount for your Pi, this one could make a lot of sense to throw at your 3D printer. It’s certainly more accomplished than this previous one we’ve shown you.

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