Category Archives: video hacks

Video Streaming Like Your Raspberry Pi Depended On It

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The Raspberry Pi is an incredibly versatile computing platform, particularly when it comes to embedded applications. They’re used in all kinds of security and monitoring projects to take still shots over time, or record video footage for later review. It’s remarkably easy to do, and there’s a wide variety of tools available to get the job done.

However, if you need live video with as little latency as possible, things get more difficult. I was building a remotely controlled vehicle that uses the cellular data network for communication. Minimizing latency was key to making the vehicle easy to drive. Thus …read more

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Handheld Gimbal with Off-The-Shelf Parts

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For anything involving video capture while moving, most videographers, cinematographers, and camera operators turn to a gimbal. In theory it is a simple machine, needing only three sets of bearings to allow the camera to maintain a constant position despite a shifting, moving platform. In practice it’s much more complicated, and gimbals can easily run into the thousands of dollars. While it’s possible to build one to reduce the extravagant cost, few use 100% off-the-shelf parts like [Matt]’s handheld gimbal.

[Matt]’s build was far more involved than bolting some brackets and bearings together, though. Most gimbals for filming are powered, …read more

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I am an Iconoscope

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We’d never seen an iconoscope before. And that’s reason enough to watch the quirky Japanese, first-person video of a retired broadcast engineer’s loving restoration. (Embedded below.)

Quick iconoscope primer. It was the first video camera tube, invented in the mid-20s, and used from the mid-30s to mid-40s. It worked by charging up a plate with an array of photo-sensitive capacitors, taking an exposure by allowing the capacitors to discharge according to the light hitting them, and then reading out the values with another electron scanning beam.

The video chronicles [Ozaki Yoshio]’s epic rebuild in what looks like the most amazingly …read more

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Movie Encoded in DNA is the First Step Toward Datalogging with Living Cells

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While DNA is a reasonably good storage medium, it’s not particularly fast, cheap, or convenient to read and write to.

What if living cells could simplify that by recording useful data into their own DNA for later analysis? At Harvard Medical School, scientists are working towards this goal by using CRISPR to encode and retrieve a short video in bacterial cells.

CRISPR is part of the immune system of many bacteria, and works by storing sequences of viral DNA in a specific location to identify and eliminate viral infections. As a tool for genetic engineering, it’s cheaper and has fewer …read more

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Game Gear, Console Edition

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What if the Game Gear had been a console system? [Bentika] answered that question by building a consolized version of this classic handheld. For those not in the know when it comes to 1980s Sega consoles, the Game Gear is technically very similar to the Master System. In fact, the Game Gear can even play Master System games with a third-party adapter. However, the reverse isn’t the case as the screen aspect ratios were different and the Game Gear had a larger palette, which meant the Master System wasn’t compatible with Game Gear titles.

Sega’s decision to omit an AV …read more

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Shoot Video in 26 Different Directions

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[Mark Mullins] is working on a project called Quamera: a camera that takes video in every direction simultaneously, creating realtime 3D environments on the fly.

[Mark] is using 26 Arducams, arranging them in a rhombicuboctahedron configuration, which consists of three rings of 8 cameras with each ring controlled by a Beaglebone; the top and bottom rings are angled at 45 degrees, while the center ring looks straight out. The top and bottom cameras are controlled by a fourth Beaglebone, which also serves to communicate with the Nvidia Jetson TX1 that runs everything. Together, these cameras can see in all directions …read more

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Sega’s Game Gear Gets a Video Output

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[EvilTim] dug deep into a classic system to finally give the Game Gear a proper video output.  The Game Gear was Sega’s answer to Nintendo’s Gameboy. Rushed to market, the Game Gear reused much of the hardware from the very popular Master System Console. The hardware wasn’t quite identical though – especially the cartridge slot. You couldn’t play Game Gear games on a Master System, and the game gear lacked an AV output, which meant gamers were stuck playing on a small fluorescent backlit LCD screen.

[EvilTim] wanted to play some of those retro titles on a regular TV using …read more

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VR and Back Again: An XRobots Tale

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Our friend [James Burton] from XRobots has engaged in another bit of mixed-reality magic by showing how one can seamlessly step from the virtual world into the real world, and back again. Begone, green screens and cumbersome lighting!

Now, most of what you’re seeing is really happening in post-production — for now — but the test footage is the precursor for a more integrated system down the road. As it works now, a GoPro is attached to the front of a HTC Vive headset, allowing [Burton] to record in both realities at the same time. In the VR test area …read more

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Vintage Portable TV Turned Retro Gaming System

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When [FinnAndersen] found an old TV set by the side of the road, he did what any self-respecting DIY/gaming enthusiast would do: He took it apart and installed a Raspberry Pi 3 running RetroPie in it in order to play retro games on a retro TV!

[Finn] took the CRT out of the TV before realizing that it actually worked. It was already too late, so [Finn] ordered a 12″ LCD screen to put in its place. He liked the idea of the curved screen the CRT had, though, so he molded a piece of acrylic around the CRT and, …read more

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Mangling Images With Audio Effects

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Ever wonder what those snapshots you took of your trip to Paris would look like if you ran them through a Proco RAT or a Boss Overdrive? How about a BF-3 flanger? [Robert Foss] wrote in with this nifty little script (GitHub) that processes images as if they were audio files so that you can try it out without investing in a rack of analog pedals. Test your audio/visual DSP intuition and see if you can name the images without looking at the effects.

If you know your Linux command-line utilities, there’s really not much to it — scroll down …read more

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