Category Archives: digital cameras hacks

Custom Zynq/CMOS Camera Unlocks Astrophotography

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Around here we love technology for its own sake. But we have to admit, most people are interested in applications–what can the technology do? Those people often have the best projects. After all, there’s only so many blinking LED projects you can look at before you want something more.

[Landingfield] is interested in astrophotography. He was dismayed at the cost of commercial camera sensors suitable for work like this, so he decided he would create his own. Although he started thinking about it a few years ago, he started earnestly in early 2016.

The project uses a Nikon sensor and …read more

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Mod Your Camera With ModBus

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Industrial hardware needs to be reliable, tough, and interoperable. For this reason, there are a series of standards used for command & control connections between equipment. One of the more widespread standards is ModBus, an open protocol using a master-slave architecture, usually delivered over RS-485 serial. It’s readily found being used with PLCs, HMIs, VFDs, and all manner of other industrial equipment that comes with a TLA (three letter acronym).

[Absolutelyautomation] decided to leverage ModBus to control garden variety digital cameras, of the type found cluttering up drawers now that smartphones have come so far. This involves getting old-school, by …read more

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Instant Camera with This Year’s Hottest Dithering Technique

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Digital cameras are great, because you can take thousands of pictures without running out of film. But there’s something to be said for having a tangible image you can hold in your hand. The Polaroid cameras of yesteryear were great for this, but now they’re hard to find and the price per photograph is ludicrously expensive.

Over the past few years, a few people have sought a way to create printed photographs at a lower cost. One of the best ways to do this is to find something much cheaper than Polaroid film — like thermal paper.

[Fabien-Chouteau]’s thermal printing …read more

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Raspberry Pi Camera Flash

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The Raspberry Pi Camera is a great tool; it allows projects that require a camera to be put together quickly and on a budget. Plus, having a Linux back end for a little processing never hurt anybody. What can be difficult however, is imaging in low light conditions. Most smartphones have an LED flash built in for this purpose. [Wim Van Gool] decided to follow suit and build an LED flash for the Raspberry Pi.

The project consists of a custom PCB with surface-mount LEDs in an attractive concentric layout. This is a good way to get a nice even …read more

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Build This Barn Door Tracker Today, Take Stunning Shots of the Galaxy Tonight

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Think you need some fancy equipment to get stunning shots of the night sky? Surely those long-exposure shots that show the Milky Way in all its glory take expensive telescopes with complicated motor-driven equatorial mounts, right? Guess again – you can slap together this simple barn door tracker for a DSLR for a couple of bucks and by wowing people with your astrophotography prowess tonight.

Those stunning, deeply saturated shots of our galaxy require a way to cancel out the Earth’s movement, lest star trails ruin your long exposure shots. Enter the barn door tracker, a simple device to let …read more

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Build This Barn Door Tracker Today, Take Stunning Shots of the Galaxy Tonight

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Think you need some fancy equipment to get stunning shots of the night sky? Surely those long-exposure shots that show the Milky Way in all its glory take expensive telescopes with complicated motor-driven equatorial mounts, right? Guess again – you can slap together this simple barn door tracker for a DSLR for a couple of bucks and by wowing people with your astrophotography prowess tonight.

Those stunning, deeply saturated shots of our galaxy require a way to cancel out the Earth’s movement, lest star trails ruin your long exposure shots. Enter the barn door tracker, a simple device to let …read more

Continue reading Build This Barn Door Tracker Today, Take Stunning Shots of the Galaxy Tonight→

High-Quality Film Transfers with this Raspberry Pi Frame Grabber

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Untold miles of film were shot by amateur filmmakers in the days before YouTube, iPhones, and even the lowly VHS camcorder. A lot of that footage remains to be discovered in attics and on the top shelves of closets, and when you find that trove of precious family memories, you’ll be glad to have this Raspberry Pi enabled frame-by-frame film digitizer at your disposal.

With a spare Super 8mm projector and a Raspberry Pi sitting around, [Joe Herman] figured he had the makings of a good way to preserve his grandfather’s old films. The secret of high-quality film transfers is …read more

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Converting Film Camera to Digital the Hard Way

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[Robin] is a hobby photographer with some very nice old film camera gear. But who has the money or patience for developing film these days? (Well, lots of people, especially artists, but that’s a different Hackaday article.) So to update his old gear without breaking the bank, he glommed a Sony Nex digital camera onto the back of a nice old Nikon, and documented the process for us.

A friend of mine once said, “never underestimate what a good engineer can do with a file and patience.” [Robin]’s hack essentially consists of grinding the Sony’s CMOS sensor to fit exactly …read more

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3D Printed GoPro Toy Car Mount

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There’s been a spate of YouTube videos of people strapping GoPro cameras onto things recently. [Ruiz] at [Adafruit] is looking to contribute to this trend with this tutorial on 3D printing a GoPro Session toy car mount. The entire toy car mount is 3D printed, except for the axles, which are made of the unprinted filament with melted ends to hold the wheels in place.

The part of the mount that fits around the camera is printed in a flexible filament (think Ninjaflex), so it holds on tightly to the GoPro and can be used as a bumper as well. …read more

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Ruggedizing A Cheap Camera For Spacecraft Testing

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Name the countries that house a manned space program. In order of arrival in space, USSR/Russian Federation, United States of America, People’s Republic of China. And maybe one day, Denmark. OK, not the Danish government. But that doesn’t stop the country having a manned space program, in the form of Copenhagen Suborbitals. As the tagline on their website has it: “We’re 50 geeks building and flying our own rockets. One of us will fly into space“. If that doesn’t catch the attention of Hackaday readers, nothing will.

For their rocket testing they need a lot of video feeds, …read more

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