Collaborate Disseminate
Modern building techniques are relying more and more on passive elements to improve heating and cooling efficiencies, from placing windows in ways to either absorb sunlight or shade it out …read more Continue reading Hackaday Prize 2023: AutoDuct Smart Air Duct
Buying old cameras is one of the best ways yet found to part a geek from their money, but if you don’t mind finding a few duds along the way …read more Continue reading A Shutter Speed Tester With Frickin’ Lasers!
There once was a time when all but the most basic of fixed focus and aperture cameras gave the photographer full control over both shutter speed and f-stop. This allowed …read more Continue reading A Vintage Polaroid Camera Goes Manual
Try to put yourself in the place of an engineer tasked with building a camera in 1961. Your specs include making it easy to operate, giving it automatic exposure control, …read more Continue reading A Solar-Powered Point-and-Shoot, circa 1961
Modern DSLR cameras are incredible pieces of technology that can take excellent high-quality photos as well as record video and audio. However, as they become jacks of all trades they risk being masters of none, and the audio quality in …read more
Continue reading Extensive Modification of DSLR Includes High Quality Audio
Hardly a person hasn’t experienced the sudden, sharp discharge of static electricity, especially on a crisp winter’s day. It usually requires a touch, though, the classic example being a spark from finger to doorknob after scuffing across the carpet. But how would one measure the electrostatic charge of an object …read more
Continue reading Whirling Shutters on This Field Mill Measure Electrostatic Charges at Distance
In a time when cameras have been reduced to microchips, it’s ironic that the old view camera, with its bellows and black cloth draped over the viewscreen for focusing, endures as an icon for photography. Such technology appears dated and with no application in the modern world, but as [Ben …read more
Continue reading [Ben Krasnow] Rolls Old School Camera Out for Photolithography
If you were tasked with designing a color video monitor, it’s pretty clear how you’d go about it. But what if you’d been asked to do so 20 years ago? Would it have been a cut and dried from an engineering standpoint? Apparently not, as this hybrid LCD-CRT video monitor …read more
Continue reading Monochrome CRT and Liquid Crystal Shutter Team Up for Color Video
Most photographs are made in the fraction of a second that the camera’s shutter is gathering reflected light from the scene. But there’s fun to be had by leaving the shutter open and directing light into the camera. Called light painting, it can be as simple as a camera on …read more
The gold standard for laser light shows during rock concerts is Pink Floyd, with shows famous for visual effects as well as excellent music. Not all of us have the funding necessary to produce such epic tapestries of light and sound, but with a little bit of hardware we can get something close. [James]’s latest project is along these lines: he recently built a laser light graphical equalizer that can be used when his band is playing gigs.
To create the laser lines for the equalizer bands, [James] used a series of mirrors mounted on a spinning shaft. When a …read more
Continue reading Laser Light Show Turned Into Graphical Equalizer