The average Hackaday reader is likely at least familiar with acoustic levitation — a technique by which carefully arranged ultrasonic transducers can be used to suspend an object in the air indefinitely. It’s a neat trick, the sort of thing that drives them wild at science fairs, but as the technique only works on exceptionally […]
Photo-printing kiosks are about as common as payphones these days. However, there was a time when they were everywhere. The idea was that if you didn’t have a good printer at home, you could take your digital files to a kiosk, pay your money, and run off some high-quality images. [Snappiness] snagged one, and if […]
[Project 326] has a cheap thermal camera that plugs into a smart phone. Sure they are handy, but what if you could hack one into a microscope with a resolution measured in microns? It is easier than you might think and you can see how in the video below. Of course, microscopes need lenses, but […]
If you’re a photography enthusiast, you probably own quite a few cameras, but the chances are your “good” one will have interchangeable lenses. Once you’ve exhausted the possibilities of the kit lens, you can try different focal lengths and effects, but you’ll soon find out that good glass isn’t cheap. Can you solve this problem […]
Nowadays, if you have a microscope, you probably have a camera of some sort attached. [Applied Science] shows how you can add an array of tiny LEDs and some compute power to produce high-resolution images — higher than you can get with the microscope on its own. The idea is to illuminate each LED in […]
Holography is about capturing 3D data from a scene, and being able to reconstruct that scene — preferably in high fidelity. Holography is not a new idea, but engaging in it is not exactly a point-and-shoot affair. One needs coherent light for a start, and it generally only gets touchier from there. But now researchers […]
What does one do when frustrated at the lack of affordable, open source portable trackers? If you’re [OG-star-tech], you design your own and give it modular features that rival commercial offerings while you’re at it. What’s a star tracker? It’s a method of determining position based on visible stars, but when it comes to astrophotography the […]
What do you do with a four-megapixel monochrome digital camera from the 90s that needed a dedicated PC with a frame grabber card to do anything useful? Easy — you turn it into a point-and-shoot by building your own frame grabber. At least that’s what [Frost Sheridan] did with a vintage Kodak MegaPlus 4.2i, a […]
The Camp Snap is a simple fixed-focus digital camera with only an optical viewfinder and a shot counter, which has become a surprise hit among photography enthusiasts for its similarity to a disposable film camera. [Snappiness] has one, and also having a liking for waist-level viewfinders as found on twin-lens reflex cameras, decided to make […]
Photographic accessories are often plagued by high prices, as photography is considered a rich man’s game. It doesn’t have to be that way though, and [Snappiness] is here to get you started on the route to cheaper kit with a waist-level viewfinder project. If you’ve used a twin-lens reflex camera then you should be familiar […]