The Lowly Wall Wart Laid Bare

April 2, 2025 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

Getting a look at the internals of a garden variety “wall wart” isn’t the sort of thing that’s likely to excite the average Hackaday reader. You’ve probably cracked one open yourself, and even if you haven’t, you’ve likely got a pretty good idea of what’s inside that sealed up brick of plastic. But sometimes a teardown can be just as much about the journey as it is the end result.

Truth be told, we’re not 100% sure if this teardown from [Brian Dipert] over at EDN was meant as an April Fool’s joke or not. Certainly it was posted on the right day, but the style is close enough to some of his previous work that it’s hard to say. In any event, he’s created a visual feast — never in history has an AC/DC adapter been photographed so completely and tastefully.

[Brian] even goes so far as to include images of the 2.5 lb sledgehammer and paint scraper that he uses to brutally break open the ultrasonic-welded enclosure. The dichotomy between the thoughtful imagery and the savage way [Brian] breaks the device open only adds to the surreal nature of the piece. Truly, the whole thing seems like it should be part of some avant garde installation in SoHo.

After he’s presented more than 20 images of the exterior of the broken wall wart, [Brian] finally gets to looking at the internals. There’s really not much to look at, there’s a few circuit diagrams and an explanation of the theory behind these unregulated power supplies, and then the write-up comes to a close as abruptly as it started.

So does it raise the simple teardown to an art form? We’re not sure, but we know that we’ll never look at a power adapter in quite the same way again.

A Camera That Signs Off Your Pictures

November 20, 2023 by Al Williams 38 Comments

We’ll admit we’ve kicked around the idea of a camera that digitally signs a picture so you could prove it hasn’t been altered and things like the time and place the photo was taken for years. Apparently, products are starting to hit the market, and Spectrum reports on a Leica that, though it will set you back nearly $10,000, can produce pictures with cryptographic signatures.

This isn’t something Leica made up. In 2019, a consortium known as the Content Authenticity Initiative set out to establish a standard for this sort of thing. The founders are no surprise: The New York Times, Adobe, and Twitter. There are 200 companies involved now, although Twitter — now X — has left.

The problem, the post notes, is that software support is limited. There are only a few programs that recognize and process digital signatures. That’ll change, of course, and — we imagine — if you needed to prove the provenance of a photo in court, you’d just buy the right software you needed.

We haven’t dug into the technology, but presumably keeping the private key secure will be very important. The consortium is clear that the technology is not about managing rights, and it is possible to label a picture anonymously. The signature can identify if an image was taken with a camera or generated by AI and details about how it was taken. It also can detect any attempt to tamper with the image. Compliant programs can make modifications, but they will be traceable through the cryptographic record.

Will it work? Probably. Can it be broken? We don’t know, but we wouldn’t bet that it couldn’t without a lot more reading. PDF signatures can be hacked. Our experience is that not much is truly unhackable.

3D Printed Mars Rover Smiles For The Camera

May 28, 2021 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

You’d be forgiven for thinking these pictures of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover were renderings of the real deal on the Red Planet, if it wasn’t for the golf ball tucked in for scale, anyway. What you’re actually looking at is a 3D printed model made by [Alex Givens] that he brought out to the desert for a photo shoot by his friend [Josh Jalil].

[Alex] printed the parts for the model on the Ender 5 Pro, while [Josh] snapped the shots using a Canon EOS 90D. The realism of the final shots serves as a testament to how well they’ve honed their respective tools, but credit for the 3D model itself has to go to the good folks over at NASA.

The highly detailed Perseverance model came from the space agency’s extensive “3D Resources” collection, which has models for an incredible array of present and historical spacecraft. They’ve also got models for a number of interesting astronomical objects, just in case you’re in the market for a 3D printed asteroid or two.

We know, this isn’t exactly a hack in the traditional sense. But it’s a fantastic reminder of a great resource from NASA, as well as a practical demonstration of how high quality photographs can really bring a project to life.

Legacy Digital Photos, With A Side Of Murphy’s Law

February 14, 2021 by Donald Papp 26 Comments

[Dave Madison] came across some old digital photos, and in his quest to access them, he ran into quite a few challenges. The saga brings to mind both Murphy’s Law, and while [Dave] prevailed in the end, it required quite a few more steps than one might expect.

The one smooth part of the process was that Konica’s proprietary software had a handy JPEG export feature.

Here’s the scene: in the late 90s, Konica partnered with photo shops to provide a photo scanning service, delivering digital scans of film photos on 3.5″ floppy disks, and that’s exactly what [Dave] had to work with. The disks were in good condition, and since modern desktop computers still support floppy drives and the FAT filesystem, in theory all one needs to do is stick disks into the reader one at a time in order to access the photos.

Sadly, problems started early. A floppy drive is revoltingly slow compared to any modern storage device, so [Dave]’s first step was to copy all of the files to his machine’s local storage before working on them. This took a bit of wrangling to deal with 8.3 format file names and avoid naming collisions across disks while still preserving some metadata such as original creation date. It was nothing a quick python script couldn’t handle, but that soon led to the next hurdle.

The photos in question were in an obsolete and proprietary Konica .KQP format. [Dave] went through a number of photo viewing programs that claimed to support .KQP, but none of them actually recognized the images.

Fortunately, each disk contained a copy of Konica’s proprietary “PC PictureShow” viewer, but despite having a variety of versions dated between 1997 and 2001 (making them from the Windows 98 and Windows ME eras) [Dave] could not get any version of the program to run in Windows 10, even with compatibility mode for legacy programs enabled. The solution was to set up a Windows XP virtual machine using Oracle’s Virtualbox, and use that to ultimately run PC PictureShow and finally access the photos. After all that work, [Dave] finally had a stroke of luck: Konica’s software had a handy feature to export images in JPEG format, and it worked like a charm.

In the end, [Dave] was able to save 479 out of the 483 images on the old floppy disks, with a reminder that proprietary formats are a pain. The disks and images may have been over twenty years old, but the roots of digital imaging go considerably further back than that. Take a few minutes out your day to read a bit about Russell Kirsch and the first digitized image, that of his three-month old son in 1957.

Eclipse Megamovie: Thousands Of Cameras For Citizen Science

August 8, 2017 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

On August 21, 2017, the Moon will cast its shadow across the entire breadth of the United States for the first time in almost a century. It is estimated that 12 million people live within the path in which the sun will be blotted out, and many millions more are expected to pour into the area to experience the wonders of totality.

We’d really love it if you would tell us where you’ll be during the eclipse by creating your own event page, but that’s not what this article’s about. With millions gathered in a narrow swath from Oregon to South Carolina, and with the eclipse falling on a Monday so that the prior two weekend days will be filled with campouts at prime viewing locations, I expect that Eclipse 2017 will be one big coast-to-coast party. This is an event that will attract people of all stripes, from those with no interest in astronomy that have only the faintest idea of what’s actually happening celestially, to those so steeped in the science that they’ll be calling out the exact beginning of totality and when to expect Baily’s Beads to appear.

I suspect our readership leans closer to the latter than the former, and some may want to add to the eclipse experience by participating in a little citizen science. Here’s how you can get involved.

Continue reading “Eclipse Megamovie: Thousands Of Cameras For Citizen Science” →

How To Take Pictures Of PCBs

July 25, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 50 Comments

While we’ve covered light box builds and other DIY photography solutions, general picture-snapping tips and tricks are a bit out of the purview of what we normally write about. Nevertheless, [Alain] just put up a great tutorial for taking pictures of PCBs. This is a great skill to have — no one cares about what you’ve built unless you have a picture of it — and the same techniques can be applied to other small bits and bobs of electronic equipment.

As with all matters of photography, light is important. [Alain] built a DIY light box using two cheap outdoor square LED panels and some scrap wood. There’s really nothing to this build: just build a box that holds soft, diffused light.

A camera is a little more complicated than a box, and here [Alain] is using an entry-level DSLR with a kit lens. The takeaway here is to set the aperture to the highest number (or smallest hole) possible while still keeping a reasonable shutter speed. This increases the depth of field and produces a picture where the board and the tops of components are in focus.

There are a few more tips for getting the best PCB pics possible including shooting in RAW for Aperture or Lightroom, getting a macro lens, and using a tripod. Like all things, there’s a law of diminishing returns, and even with a smartphone camera and a DIY light box, you can produce some fantastic pics of PCBs.

Byte Magazine Nostalgia Photo

November 26, 2015 by Rud Merriam 28 Comments

Those of us who remember when microprocessors were young also recall the magazines of the era. Readers bought the magazine for content but the covers attracted attention on the newsstand. In the late 70s until the early 90s the competition was fierce, so great covers were mandatory. The covers of Byte magazine created by [Robert Tinney] were detailed, colorful, and always interesting.

[Bob Alexander] of Galactic Studios recreated one of those hand drawn covers using photographic techniques. The cover shows a steam engine, tender and caboose rolling along the traces on a PC board amidst a landscape populated by resistors, capacitors, and integrated circuits. The photographic clone recreates that image using all real components, including an HO train. The circuit, unfortunately, isn’t of a working device.

Creating this work followed all the normal hacking steps for a PC board: a mockup of the layout, designing the board, and ordering it from China. Component procurement was sometimes a hassle since some are no longer in production. The components that weren’t found on EBay were hacked.

The only image manipulation involved the HO train. It was much larger than the PC board so could not be put in place for the photo. Images of the PC board and the train were merged using software. Also added were smoke rings puffing out of the locomotive’s smokestack.

The photo is a worthy recreation of [Tinney’s] original.

For more trainy goodness, check out our own Brian Benchoff’s tour of the Siemens Model Train Club. Or for further photo-realistic modelling, have a look at this insanely detailed Ford pickup model.