Category Archives: digital cameras hacks

Light Painting Animations Directly From Blender

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Light painting: there’s something that never gets old about waving lights around in a long exposure photo. Whilst most light paintings are single shots, some artists painstakingly create frame-by-frame animations. This is pretty hard to do when moving a light around by hand: it’s mostly guesswork, as it’s difficult to see the results of your efforts until after the photo has been taken. But what if you could make the patterns really precise? What if you could model them in 3D?

[Josh Sheldon] has done just that, by creating a process which allows animations formed in Blender to be traced …read more

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HOPE XII: Make Your Own Holograms

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Prior to this weekend I had assumed making holograms to be beyond the average hacker’s reach, either in skill or treasure. I was proven wrong by a Club-Mate box full of electronics, and an acrylic jig perched atop an automotive inner tube. At the Hope Conference, Tommy Johnson was sharing his hacker holography in a workshop that let a few lucky attendees make their own holograms on site!

The technique used here depends on interference patterns rather than beam splitting. A diffused laser beam is projected through holographic film onto the subject of the hologram — say a bouquet of …read more

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An Optical Mouse Sensor For Robotic Vision

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Readers with long memories will remember the days when mice and other similar pointing devices relied upon a hard rubber ball in contact with your desk or other surface, that transmitted any motion to a pair of toothed-wheel rotation sensors. Since the later half of the 1990s though, your rodent has been ever significantly more likely to rely upon an optical sensor taking the form of a small CCD camera connected to motion sensing electronics. These cameras are intriguing components with applications outside pointing devices, as is shown by [FoxIS] who has used one for robot vision.

The robot in …read more

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Simple Camera Slider Adds a Dimension or Two to Your Shots

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Camera sliders are a popular build, and properly executed they can make for impressive shots for both time-lapse sequences or real-time action. But they seem best suited for long shots, as dollying a camera in a straight line just moves subjects close to the camera through the frame.

This slider with both pan and tilt axes can make moving close-ups a lot easier. With his extremely detailed build log, [Dejan Nedalkovski] shows how he went about building his with only the simplest of materials and tools. The linear rail is simply a couple of pieces of copper pipe supported by …read more

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Who Said Thermal Cameras Weren’t Accessible To The Masses?

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Thermal cameras hold an enduring fascination as well as being a useful tool for the engineer. After all, who wouldn’t want to point one at random things around the bench, laughing with glee at finding things warmer or colder than expected? But they’ve always been so expensive, and a lot of the efforts that have sought to provide one for little outlay have been rather disappointing.

This has not deterred [Offer] though, who has made an extremely professional-looking thermal camera using an M5Stack ESP32-based computer module and an AMG8833 thermal sensor array module in a 3D-printed case that copies …read more

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Stars Looking A Bit Dim? Throw Some Math At Them.

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As the cost of high-resolution images sensors gets lower, and the availability of small and cheap single board computers skyrockets, we are starting to see more astrophotography projects than ever before. When you can put a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero and a decent webcam outside in a box to take autonomous pictures of the sky all night, why not give it a shot? But in doing so, many hackers are recognizing a fact well-known to traditional telescope jockeys: seeing a few stars is easy, seeing a lot of stars is another story entirely.

The problem is that stars are fairly …read more

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3D Printed Clockwork Star Tracker

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Astrophotography is one of those things you naturally assume must be pretty difficult; surely something so awesome requires years of practice and specialized equipment which costs as much as your car. You shake your fist at the sky (since you have given up on taking pictures of it), and move on with your life. Another experience you’ll miss out on.

But in reality, dramatic results don’t necessarily require sticker shock. We’ve covered cheap DIY star trackers before on Hackaday, but this design posted on Thingiverse by [Tinfoil_Haberdashery] is perhaps the easiest we’ve ever seen. It keeps things simple by using …read more

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People with Dementia can DRESS Smarter

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People with dementia have trouble with some of the things we take for granted, including dressing themselves. It can be a remarkably difficult task involving skills like balance, pattern recognition inside of other patterns, ordering, gross motor skill, and dexterity to name a few. Just because something is common, doesn’t mean it is easy. The good folks at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing, Arizona State University, and MGH Institute of Health Professions talked with a caregiver focus group to find a way for patients to regain their privacy and replace frustration with independence.

Although this is in the context …read more

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Arduino Star Tracker Raises the Bar

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Proving that astrophotography doesn’t have to break the bank, [Gerald Gattringer] has recently documented his DIY “barn door” style star tracker which is built almost entirely from scratch. Short of the Arduino and stepper motor, all the components were either made by hand or are standard hardware store finds.

The build starts with three aluminum plates which [Gerald] cut by hand with an angle grinder. He then drilled all the necessary screw holes and a rectangular opening for the threaded rod to pass through. He even used epoxy to mount a nut to the bottom plate which would eventually attach …read more

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Impossibly Huge Depth of Focus in Microscope Photographs

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Sometimes, less is more. Sometimes, more is more. There is a type of person who believes that if enough photos of the same subject are taken, one of them will shine above the rest as a gleaming example of what is possible with a phone camera and a steady hand. Other people know how to frame a picture before hitting the shutter button. In some cases, the best method may be snapping a handful of photos to get one good one, not by chance, but by design.

[The Thought Emporium]’s video, also below the break, is about getting crisp pictures …read more

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