Freeze Laser Beams — Sort Of

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and by that logic a video must be worth millions. However, from nearly the dawn of photography around 1840, photographers have made fake photographs.  In modern times, Photoshop and Deepfake make you mistrust images and videos. [Action Lab] has a great camera trick in which it looks like he can control the speed of light. You can see the video below.

You probably can guess that he can’t really do it. But he has videos where a real laser beam appears to slowly move across the screen like a laser blaster shot in a movie. You might think you only need to slow down the video speed, but light is really fast, so you probably can’t practically pull that stunt.

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Arduino (and Camera) Take Amazing Pictures

There’s an old joke where you ask someone what’s the most important thing about comedy. When they get to about the word “important,” you interrupt them and say, “Timing!” Perhaps the same thing can be said for photography. [Ted Kinsman’s] students at the Rochester Institute of Technology would probably agree. They built an Arduino-based rig to do inexpensive stop action photography.

As Arduino projects go, it isn’t very sophisticated. The circuit contains a  sound detection module and an optoisolator. The code would easily fit on a piece of notebook paper. When a loud sound occurs, the Arduino triggers the flash. Simple enough, but the resulting pictures are amazing. It also looks like a lot of fun to destroy perfectly good things in the name of art.

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Slow Motion Frame Will Be The New Magic Mirror

[Paul] created a frame that uses an Arduino and LEDs to create a slow motion illusion of a delicate item (like a flower or a feather). The effect is striking as you can see in the video below.

[Paul] had seen similar projects (both one-offs and sold as a product), but wanted to do his own take on it. The principle is simple: The device vibrates the objects at one frequency and strobes LEDs at a slightly different frequency (80 and 79.5 Hz, in this case). The difference between the frequencies (the beat frequency) is what your eye perceives as a very slow (0.5 Hz, here) motion.

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