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551 Articles

Five Bucks, Three Parts: WiFi Camera Remote

January 24, 2016 by 14 Comments

It’s just ridiculous how cheap and easy it is to do some things today that were both costly and difficult just two or three years ago. Case in point: Hackaday.io user [gamaral] built a WiFi remote control for his Canon E3 camera out of just three parts: an ESP8266 module, a voltage regulator, and a stereo plug that the camera uses as its remote trigger.

And the codebase is just about as minimal, although it’s not without its nice touches. Control is easy — just pull down a pin for focus or shutter. The ESP listens to a custom port, and when it gets the message, “presses” or “releases” the pins. It’s a good, simple example of how to work with the ESP IOT SDK.

The timing is all on the client side. [gamaral] knew that he was going to want to play around with how long to hold down the focus button, for instance, so he left that flexible. Using Netcat makes the client-side code completely trivial: echo -n "SHUTTER HOLD" | nc -w 1 -q 1 roosevelt 9021. Bam. And it worked first time. Check the well-done video just below for more details.

And keep your eye on [gamaral]’s Hackaday.io page, because he’s going to make another video when the PCBs arrive in the mail.

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Flat Camera Uses No Lens

January 11, 2016 by 51 Comments

Early cameras and modern cameras work pretty much the same way. A lens (or a pinhole acting as a lens) focuses an image onto a sensor. Of course, sensor, in this case, is a broad term and could include a piece of film that–after all–does sense light via a chemical reaction. Sure, lenses and sensors get better or, at least, different, but the basic design has remained the same since the Chinese built the camera obscura around 400BC (and the Greeks not long after that).

Of course, the lens/sensor arrangement works well, but it does limit how thin you can make a camera. Cell phone cameras are pretty skinny, but there are applications where even they are too thick. That’s why researchers at Rice University are working on a new concept design for a flat camera that uses no lens. You can see a video about the new type of camera below.

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Drive A Sony Camera With An ESP8266

January 9, 2016 by 11 Comments

Nearly everything has WiFi these days. [glaskugelsehen]’s Sony camera uses the wireless network to transfer photos to the computer, naturally, and it also has a remote-control application that’ll run on Android smartphones. [glaskugelsehen] doesn’t have an Android — but he does have shows us an ESP8266 that he turned into a WiFi-powered remote for the camera (Google translate into English).

Sony actually made [glaskugelsehen]’s work easy here. They have a publicly available API for the camera’s controls, and it’s all run by JSON sent over HTML HTTP POST. Which is to say, that it’s a piece of cake to script as long as you can send HTMLHTTP directives.

[glaskugelsehen]’s code, written in the Arduino environment for the ESP, first finds the camera’s WiFi network and authenticates to it. Then it sets the camera into remote-control mode, and takes over from there. So far, he’s only implemented taking still photos, but from the API it looks like you can also stop and start video recordings and more.

And yeah. We just wrote up another project doing virtually the same thing with a GoPro. [glaskugelsehen] read that too, and mentions it in his blog. We love it when people take inspiration from each other!

The Filmomat Home Film Processing System

December 8, 2015 by 31 Comments

The death of film has been widely reported, but technologies are only perfected after they’ve been made obsolete. It may not be instant photography, but there is at least one machine that will take 35mm film and 5×7″ prints and develop them automatically. It’s called the Filmomat, and while it won’t end up in the studios of many photographers, it is an incredible example of automation.

The Filmomat is an incredible confabulation of valves, tubes, and pumps that will automatically process any reasonably sized film, from 35mm to 5×7 color slides. The main body of the machine is an acrylic cube subdivided into different sections containing photo processing chemicals, rinse water, and baths. With a microcontroller, an OLED display, and a rotary encoder, different developing processes can be programmed in, the chemicals heated, developer agitated, and film processed. The Filomat is capable of storing fifty different processes that use three chemicals and a maximum of ten steps.

The video for this device is what sells it, although not quite yet; if enough people are interested, the Filmomat might be sold one day. This is likely the easiest film developing will ever get, but then again a technology is only perfected after it has been made obsolete.

Thanks [WhiteRaven] for sending this one in.

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REM Detection Lets You Boss Around Your Dreams

December 7, 2015 by 33 Comments

[Michael] has been working on projects involving lucid dreaming for a long time. The recurring problem with most projects of this nature, though, is that they often rely on some sort of headgear or other wearable which can be cumbersome to actually sleep with. He seems to have made some headway on that problem by replacing some of the offending equipment with a small camera that can detect eye movements just as well as other methods.

The idea behind projects like this is that a piece of hardware detects when the user is in REM sleep, and activates some cue which alerts the sleeper to the fact that they’re dreaming (without waking them up). Then, the sleeper can take control of the dream. The new device uses a small camera that dangles in front of an eye, which is close enough to monitor the eye’s movement. It measures the amount of change between each frame, logs the movements throughout the night and plays audio tracks or triggers other hardware when eye movements are detected.

[Michael]’s goal is to eventually communicate from inside of a dream, and has gone a long way to achieving that goal. Now that this device is more comfortable and more reliable, the dream is closer to reality. [Michael] is looking for volunteers to provide sleep logs and run tests, so if you’re interested then check out the project!

3D Printed Lens Gears For Pro-grade Focus Pulling

November 17, 2015 by 29 Comments

Key Grip, Gaffer, Best Boy – any of us who’ve sat through every last minute of a Marvel movie to get to the post-credits scene – mmm, schawarma! – have seen the obscure titles of folks involved in movie making. But “Focus Puller”? How hard can it be to focus a camera?

Turns out there’s a lot to the job, and in a many cases it makes sense to mechanize the task. Pro cinematic cameras have geared rings for just that reason, and now your DSLR lens can have them too with customized, 3D printed follow-focus gears.

Gear_Selection_01_full_render_preview_featuredUnwilling to permanently modify his DSLR camera lens and dissatisfied with after-market lens gearing solutions, [Jaymis Loveday] learned enough OpenSCAD to generate gears from 50mm to 100mm in diameter in 0.5mm increments for a snug friction fit. Teamed up with commercially available focus pulling equipment, these lens gears should really help [Jaymis] get professional results from consumer lenses. 

Unfortunately, [Jaymis] doesn’t include any video of the gears in action, but the demo footage shown below presumably has some shots that were enabled by his custom gears. And even if it doesn’t, there are some really cool shots in it worth watching.

And for the budding cinematographers out there without access to a 3D printer, there’s always this hardware store solution to focus pulling.

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Heat Duct Rover Explores Stink, Rescues Flashlight

November 12, 2015 by 32 Comments

It all started with a bad smell coming from the heat register. [CuddleBurrito] recalled a time when something stinky ended up in the ductwork of his folks’ house which ended up costing them big bucks to explore. The hacker mindset shies away from those expenditures and toward literally rolling your own solution to investigating the funk. In the process [CuddleBurrito] takes us on a journey into the bowels of his house.

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