Replacing A Point And Shoot Lens

March 9, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 19 Comments

cockeyed

Cockeyed.com is a peculiar site. It is spattered with links in an almost unintelligible manner, but if you dig hard enough, or just click randomly, you can find some pretty fun stuff. One nice writeup they’ve done is how to replace the lens in their point and shoot camera. This one happens to be a Canon Powershot sd750, but it will give you an idea about how difficult it can be for any point and shoot. The lens assembly couldn’t be replaced until almost every single piece had been disassembled. There are tons of pictures showing the process and the final result. Though the install was a success, his replacement lens was already beat up pretty bad. Looks like he’ll have to go through it all again.

[via The Old New Thing]

Remote Image Processing In JavaScript

March 7, 2009 by Eliot 2 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3_cFel26J8]

[Tom] wrote in to tell us about his JavaScript project for motion detection. It ties together two ideas we’ve talked about recently. The first is doing image processing in-browser using Canvas(), which we’ve seen employed in captcha breaking. The second is offloading heavy processing to browsers, which we saw recently in the MapReduce implementation. [Tom] is using JavaScript to compare consecutive images to determine if there’s any motion. He did this as part of MJPG-Streamer, a program for streaming images from webcams. It can run on very limited hardware, but image processing can be very intensive. Doing the image processing in-browser makes up for this limitation and means that a custom client program doesn’t have to be written. You can find the code here and a PDF about the proof of concept.

Experiments In Polaroid

February 20, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 16 Comments

polaroidpage

[Peter] found that Polaroid film was an easy medium to play with, as the ability to develop it is built in. He has done several fun experiments, from electrocuting it to making giant mozaics. The Polaroid film may not be easy to get your hands on though. They stopped producing it in the summer of 2008. Some former employees are trying hard to get it back into production, but that may never happen. Polaroid has recently received permission to sell itself at auction. We’ll just have to wait and see.

MCU Controllable Camera Mount

February 13, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 3 Comments

head

[psymansays] needed a panning head for his robotics projects. Already being familiar with the NXP LPC2148 from work, so he wanted to use that to control it. he built his own carousel out of old CDs. The axle of the carousel is a potentiometer. This is what he’s using to determine position. The gear motor was actually cobbled together with bits from a windup toy and an old motor. This may be a bit bulky, but it seems not only functional, but fairly versatile.

Fiber Optic Flash Ring

February 6, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 6 Comments

ring

For those who enjoy photography, a ring light is a nice tool to have. Being hackers, making your own seems only logical. This writeup will take you through the process of making one from fiber optics for super cheap. They basically gutted some fiber optic toys and strapped them to the lens. Sure there was a little more work involved, but that’s the gist of it. You may recall some more in depth fiber optic ring lights using LEDs or cold cathodes that we covered before.

[via Hacked Gadgets]

Autofocus Assist Light

January 26, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

afassist

[Aki]’s Nikon D2H did not come with an autofocus assist light. His other cameras have them, and he likes the feature, so he decided to hack one into his D2H. He wired into the AF system, so that his LED gets voltage when the shutter release is pressed half way. The circuit needs refinement though, he found that the light was staying on during shutter release and affecting his light metering. You can see the hack in action after the break.
Continue reading “Autofocus Assist Light” →

Hands Free Point Of View Camera

January 24, 2009 by Eliot 31 Comments

handsfree

Here’s an odd little footnote we found while perusing the Comic Tools blog. [Matt Bernier]’s blog is dedicated to drawing and inking tutorials for comic artists. He uses a lot of example photographs that involve both hands. This week, at the bottom of his post on cleaning brushes, he included a photo to illustrate how he takes all of these point of view shots. The camera is strapped securely to his head using an old lanyard. He can see the display and access the controls on the back. After composing his shot, he just sets the timer, and you get a picture of what the process looks like from his perspective. Sure, it looks silly from this angle, but it really helps out the posts.