Poopable Cameras

April 24, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 51 Comments

Pill cameras, devices for ‘capsule endoscopy’, or in much cruder terms, ‘poopable cameras’, are exceedingly cool technology. They’re astonishingly small, communicate through a gastrointestinal tract to the outside world, and have FDA certification. These three facts also mean pill cameras are incredible expensive, but that doesn’t mean a hardware hacker can’t build their own, and that’s exactly what [friarbayliff] is doing for his entry into The Hackaday Prize.

First things first: [friarbayliff] is not building one of these for human consumption. That’s a morass of regulatory requirements and ethical issues. This pill camera is only being built as an experiment, because it would be fun to build one. The pill cams swallowed by patients every day have millions of dollars in R&D behind them before human trials. That said, given a good food-safe enclosure, I’d down one of these as an experiment.

This pill camera will use a simple, off-the-shelf 2 megapixel image sensor that can be bought on eBay for less than five dollars. With a small 32-bit micro, these cameras are easy to drive and capture images from. Power is provided from a single silver oxide button cell battery and a boost converter. In total, [friarbayliff] estimates the total PCB area to be just under one square inch, making this a relatively inexpensive device to build. There will be a radio transceiver in there somewhere, but [friar] hasn’t figure that part out yet.

Pill cameras are some amazing technology, but relatively inaccessible unless you get a used one. Ew. [Mike Harrison] tore one of these pill cams apart a few years ago, and it really is an incredible device. Building one for fun – even if it won’t be used in a human – is a fantastic learning experience and a great entry for the 2016 Hackaday Prize.

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Camera Slider Helps Get The Shots With E-Waste Controller

April 23, 2016 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

A camera slider is an accessory that can really make a shot. But when your business is photography rather than building camera accessories, quick-and-dirty solutions often have to suffice. Thus the genesis of this camera slider controller.

The photographer in question in [Paulo Renato], and while his passion may be photography, he seems to have a flair for motorized dollies and sliders. This controller is a variable-speed, reversible, PIC-based design that drives an eBay gearmotor. The circuit lives on a scrap of perfboard, and it along with batteries and a buck converter are stuffed into the case-modded remains of an old KVM switch. Push buttons salvaged from another bit of e-waste act as limit switches, and a little code provides the magic. We like the hacked nature of the controller, but we wonder about the wisdom of using the former KVM’s USB ports to connect the controller to the drivetrain; it’s all fun and games until you plug a real USB device into it. In sum, though, a nice build with nice results. Check out his other videos for more on the mechanicals.

Camera slider rigs aplenty have graced our pages, including one made mostly of wood and one controlled by a fancy iPad app.

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Building The First Digital Camera

April 17, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

While the official history of the digital camera begins with a Kodak engineer tinkering around with digital electronics in 1975, the first digital camera was actually built a few months prior. At the Vintage Computer Festival East, [William Sudbrink] rebuilt the first digital camera. It’s wasn’t particularly hard, either: it was a project on the cover of Popular Electronics in February, 1975.

Cromemco catalog page for the Cyclops, the first digital camera

[William]’s exhibit, Cromemco Accessories: Cyclops & Dazzler is a demonstration of the greatest graphics cards you could buy for S-100 systems and a very rare, very weird solid-state TV camera. Introduced in the February, 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, the Cyclops was the first digital camera. This wasn’t a device that used a CCD or a normal image sensor. The image sensor in the Cyclops was a 1 kilobit DRAM from MOS, producing a digital image thirty-two pixels square.

The full description, schematic, circuit layout, and theory of operation are laid out in the Popular Electronics article; all [William] had to do was etch a PCB and source the components. The key part – a one kilobit MOS DRAM in a metal can package, carefully decapsulated – had a date code of 1976, but that is the newest component in the rebuild of this classic circuit.

To turn this DRAM into digital camera, the circuit sweeps across the rows and columns of the DRAM array, turning the charge of each cell into an analog output. This isn’t a black or white camera; there’s gray in there, or green if you connect it to an oscilloscope.

This project in Popular Electronics would be manufactured by Cromemco in late 1975 and was released as their first product in January, 1976. The Cromemco was marketed as a digital camera, designed to interface with the MITS Altair 8800 computer, allowing anyone to save digital images to disk. This was the first digital camera invented, and the first digital camera sold to consumers. It’s an amazing piece of history, and very happy [William] was able to piece this together and bring it out to the Vintage Computer Festival this weekend.

The Cyclops and oscilloscope

Circuit, board layout, and fabricated PCB

The internal layout of the cyclops

Hand Gestures Drive Car

April 5, 2016 by Bryan Cockfield 8 Comments

There are a number of ways to control an automobile without using the pedals, and sometimes even without using the steering wheel. Most commonly these alternative control mechanisms are installed in vehicles whose owners are disabled in some way, but [Anurag] has taken this idea of alternative control one step further. He has built a car that can be driven by hand gestures alone.

On a remote controlled car, a Raspberry Pi 2 was installed that handles processing and communication. A wireless network is created on the Pi, and a laptop connects to the Pi over the network. The web camera on the laptop regularly captures frames at 15 fps to check for the driver’s hand gestures. The image is converted to gray scale, thresholded, contours are obtained, and the centroid and farthest points are obtained.

After some calculations are done, a movement decision is taken. The decision is passed to the Pi, which in turn, passed that to the internal chip of the car. All of the code is available on the project’s github page. [Anurag] hopes that this can be scaled up to full sized cars in the future. We’ve seen gesture-based remote controls before that rely on Sonar sensors, so it’s interesting to see one that relies strictly on image processing.

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Vintage 8mm Camera Now Powered By Raspberry Pi

March 16, 2016 by Jenny List 20 Comments

If you are a lover of the aesthetic of vintage photography and Instagram’s filters don’t quite cut it for you, then there are plenty of opportunities even in this post-film age to sample the real thing. Plastic lens cameras from the former Soviet Bloc countries or the Pacific rim are still in production, and you can still buy 35mm and 120 roll film to put in them.

You can even still buy 8mm film for your vintage movie camera, but it’s rather pricey. [Claire Wright] is a young film maker who had an old 8mm camera and really wanted that analog film feel to her work, and she and her father solved this problem by using the 8mm camera’s lens in front of a Raspberry Pi camera sensor. Since an 8mm film frame is 4.5mm x 3.3mm and the Pi camera sensor size is 3.76mm x 2.74mm, it’s quite a good fit.

Their first prototype had a custom case which concealed the Pi camera behind the lens on rails taken from an old CD-ROM drive, and had an HDMI screen on top and a pistol grip to make it portable. An external thumb screw allowed the camera to be positioned in the focal plane.

A further refinement has stepper motor driven focus driven from an Adafruit motor drive HAT. The software is simply the standard Pi camera utilities. To demonstrate the system, she made a short video about how it came to be, and took the camera on a road trip to Austin, Texas. She tells us a local 3D print shop is working on a 3D model to replicate the camera, but sadly as yet there are no resources for the Hackaday crowd to examine.

Her video is below. She has certainly captured the feel of an 8mm film very well. If the SUVs were replaced by cars with more chrome in her Mainstreet America, you might almost be there in the 1950s.

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Hacklet 97 – Camera Projects

February 26, 2016 by Adam Fabio 9 Comments

We last covered camera projects way back in Hacklet #11. A ton of camera projects have been added to Hackaday.io since then. While the rest of the world is taking selfies, hackers, makers, and engineers have been coming up with new ways to hack their image capture devices. This week on the Hacklet, we’re taking a look at some of the best camera projects on Hackaday.io!

First up is [aleksey.grishchenko] with PiXel camera. PiXel is a camera and a live video display all in one, We wouldn’t exactly call it high-definition though! A Raspberry Pi uses its camera module to capture images of the world. [Aleksey] then processes those images and displays them on a 32 x 32 RGB LED matrix. This matrix is the same kind of tile used in large outdoor LED signs. The result is a surreal low resolution view of the world. Since the Pi, batteries, and camera all hide behind the LED matrix, there is an unobstructed view of the world around you. [Aleksey] used [Henner Zeller’s] matrix library to make this hack happen.

Next up is [Esben Rossel] with Linear CCD module. [Esben] is building a Raman spectrometer, much like 2014 Hackaday Prize finalist [fl@C@] with his own ramanPi. The heart of a spectrometer is the linear image capture device. Both of these projects use the same TCD1304 linear CCD. Linear Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) are the same type of device used in flatbed document scanners. The output of the CCD is analog, so an ADC must be used to capture the data. [Esben] is using an STM32F401RE on a Nucleo board as the control logic. The ST’s internal ADC converts the analog signal to digital. From there, it’s time to process all the spectra.

[Chiprobot] brings the classic Wii remote camera to the internet of things with
ESP8266 meets Wii Mote Camera. The Wii remote uses a camera which doesn’t output images, instead it plots the location of up to four IR LEDs. Normally these LEDs are located in the poorly named sensor bar that is sold with the Wii. Hackers have been using these cameras in projects for years now. [Chiprobot] paired his camera with the modern classic ESP8266 WiFi module. The ‘8266 is programmed to read data from the camera’s I2C bus. It then sends the data as an SVG request to the W3C website. W3C returns a formatted image based on those coordinates. The resulting image is a picture of the IR LEDs seen by the camera. Kind of like sending your negatives out to be developed.

Finally, we have [GuyisIT] with Raspberry Pi Photobooth. Photo booths are all the rage these days. First it was weddings, but now it seems like every kids party has one. [GuyisIT] didn’t rent a booth for his daughter’s birthday, he built one using his Raspberry Pi and Pi camera. The project is written in python, based upon [John Croucher’s] code. When the kids press a button, the Pi Snaps a series of pictures. The tiny Linux computer then joins and rotates the images while adding in some superhero themed graphics. Finally the Pi prints the image on to a photo printer. The biggest problem with this hack is re-triggering. The kids loved it so much, they kept pressing the big red button!

If you want to see more camera projects, check out our updated camera projects list! If I missed your project, don’t be shy! Just drop me a message on Hackaday.io. That’s it for this week’s Hacklet. As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!

Reverse Engineering A WiFi Security Camera

February 6, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

The Internet of Things is slowly turning into the world’s largest crappy robot, with devices seemingly designed to be insecure, all waiting to be rooted and exploited by anyone with the right know-how. The latest Internet-enabled device to fall is a Motorola Focus 73 outdoor security camera. It’s quite a good camera, save for the software. [Alex Farrant] and [Neil Biggs] found the software was exceptionally terrible and would allow anyone to take control of this camera and install new firmware.

The camera in question is the Motorola Focus 73 outdoor security camera. This camera connects to WiFi, features full pan, tilt, zoom controls, and feeds a live image and movement alerts to a server. Basically, it’s everything you need in a WiFi security camera. Setting up this camera is simple – just press the ‘pair’ button and the camera switches to host mode and sets up an open wireless network. The accompanying Hubble mobile app scans the network for the camera and prompts the user to connect to it. Once the app connects to the camera, the user is asked to select a WiFi connection to the Internet from a list. The app then sends the security key over the open network unencrypted. By this point, just about anyone can see the potential for an exploit here, and since this camera is usually installed outdoors – where anyone can reach it – evidence of idiocy abounds.

Once the camera is on the network, there are a few provisions for firmware upgrades. Usually, firmware upgrades are available by downloading from ‘private’ URLs and sent to the camera with a simple script that passes a URL directly into the shell as root. A few facepalms later, and [Alex] and [Neil] had root access to the camera. The root password was ‘123456’.

While there’s the beginnings of a good Internet of Camera in this product, the design choices for the software are downright stupid. In any event, if you’re looking for a network camera that you own – not a company with a few servers and a custom smartphone app – this would be near the top of the list. It’s a great beginning for some open source camera firmware.

Thanks [Mathieu] for the tip.