Building a Digicam from Scanner Elements 111
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Want a weird & wobbly digital camera, but don't want to spend over $100? Well,
Matthias Wandel, whose site is due for some /. lovin', used the guts of a cheap scanner, some camera parts, and scrap wood to build a very high quality digitcal camera. Read about progress
at this site. Oh, and he also builds things out of legos as well." I personally think that his Jenga Pistol and wasp-vacuum are pretty neat too.
lens issues (Score:4, Insightful)
Something like this is going to be next to impossible to find. and might be a photographic collectable as well?
Perfect reading for a sunday afternoon. File away as technology to remember for after the end of the world.
Re:lens issues (Score:3, Informative)
I just bought a very old vivitar SLR completed with working 50mm f1.4 and non-working 85mm f1.8. These lens are totally manual.
Re:lens issues (Score:4, Informative)
My local shop has about 3-400 lenses _in shop_. And we're talking about Finland/Helsinki, not freaking NY/Adorama.
For those who don't know: most modern lenses are fully manually operable, etc. you can set aperture & focus with your hands, without electric contact.
hmm (Score:3, Funny)
Well, I had to add some parts, but I can say for sure that the pics I took were hot.
I'm suprised you weren't sued by NewTek (Score:2)
Didn't Wil Wheaton [lysator.liu.se] work there?
W
Other inventions (Score:2, Interesting)
The marble gun seems dangerous, I can just imagine a kid understanding gun safety, yet building one of those
I DO NOT WANT TO START A DEBATE ON GUN-CONTROL
The Jenga thing however is stupid, as it makes you more likely to lose!
High Resolution Vs. High Quality (Score:1)
Re:High Resolution Vs. High Quality (Score:2, Insightful)
He was impressed with the resolution, and I think it looks pretty good too.
The point was to try and build it, not try to create a perfect image... I'm sure you've seen better images with a 1.5 megapixel camera, that's what they're built to do... I'm sure we can also assume that the picture on the site was shrunk down with a sort of image program to make it more web friendly
Re:High Resolution Vs. High Quality (Score:2)
Id say its pretty slick, in fact his whole site is (+5 interesting)
Re:High Resolution Vs. High Quality (Score:3, Interesting)
Bigger thing is that because his camera is completely computerized, it can be distortion -corrected. So actually geometrical errors can be compensated for. Same goes for colors (just scan a picture of 'test pattern' and make a grid out of it).
Hmm. Now that I think of, biggest problem is 'keeping image in focus', but that seems to handle well in his pictures.
What i'm more surprised of, is that modern conan 1D / niikon D100 don't have these kind of functions. Niikon _surely_ knows distortion properties of their lenses and they already distinguish lenses with a microchip.
Re:High Resolution Vs. High Quality (Score:1)
Speaking as someone who worked in the printing industry doing just that sort of work for about 10 years, its is NOWHERE near that easy
Re:High Resolution Vs. High Quality (Score:2)
=) Sorry for stepping on your toes. That was pretty badly spelled, I didn't mean 'colors', but geometrical errors. AFAIK if picture is 'in-focus', geometrical corrrection is relatively (there we go again =) easy. Of course one have to decide which mehod to use for interpolating. Lot's of fun, I bet.
looks safe (Score:1)
Looking at the pic [http://www.sentex.net/] [sentex.net] that looks like no under statement. It look it is designed to act as door from star-wars.
[http://www.sentex.net/] [sentex.net] I must say that looks like the safest prototype for a ejection seat =)
Infrared (Score:1)
slashdotting in progress (Score:1, Redundant)
Motion Distortion (Score:1)
Imagine this thing taking a picture of someone walking from the top down. Now that would be some trick photography.
Re:Motion Distortion (Score:1)
You can get this effect [sourceforge.net] with effectv [sourceforge.net] under linux with v4l device. Works great and there are other good effects too.
Neat page (Score:1)
I figure I'm not alone in liking this kind of stuff...
Infact, the site is already getting slower and slower... Slashdot effect...
Scanner enlargements? (Score:1)
Seriously, I've often wondered whether there could be a good way of using a lens/projector to blow up the size of a negative/slide on my flatbed scanner. I've been surprised to find that my Epson GT7000 does a better job of getting details from the shadows of slides than a dedicated Canon 2700 slide scanner, but the resolution is of course much lower. Before I borrowed the slide scanner, I tried things like projecting a slide onto the glass plate and scanning that, but although the light rays are focused properly, they are travelling in the wrong direction to be picked up by the CCD. As Matthias mentioned in his article, using a ground glass screen might be an option, but a poor one.
Would it help to remove the scanner's own lens, and focus the projector somewhere below the glass plate, do you think? (I've already discovered I can improve the detail on scanned slides by tweaking the lens, so removing it completely is not difficult.) But the prism optics in the scanning bar might screw things up a bit... Hmm. Buy a decent slide scanner I think.
Re:Scanner enlargements? (Score:1)
Taken right from the page:
Well, within a year of building this contraption, I bought a digital camera anyways.
Re:Scanner enlargements? (Score:1)
Well, within a year of building this contraption, I bought a digital camera anyways.
Yes, I know. Sorry I forgot the smiley...
That, my friends, is not all.. (Score:1)
Logical marble machine (Score:1)
Digital Millenium (Score:2, Offtopic)
Plural of lego is "lego"! (Score:1)
Re:Plural of lego is "lego"! (Score:2)
Re:Plural of lego is "lego"! (Score:2)
However, outside the world of official trademarks, most people I've ever heard refer to LEGO bricks as simply "Legos" or (when the context is already established) just "bricks" or "pieces". Just like people say they had "Pop-Tarts" for breakfast or "some Oreos" for dessert. Technically, there is no such thing as "a Pop-Tart" or "an Oreo" or "a can of Spam", only "Pop-Tarts toaster pastries" and "Oreo chocolate sandwich cookies" and "SPAM luncheon meat"...but in casual conversation, people usually make the trademark into a noun. Actually, this is something companies have to watch out for, in more "official" media like the press or television, because if they allow their trademark name to be used in too widespread fashion as a generic noun, it will become invalidated, and they will lose it...like Trampoline, Asprin, and many other companies' trademarks have in the past.
DennyK
Re:Plural of lego is "lego"! (Score:1)
Maybe it is an American English thing. I come from England, where the term legos sounds completely strange and wrong. We have always referred to several pieces of lego as lego as in I am going to play with my lego or I would like some more lego.
On the Lego Website [lego.com] they seem very careful to always say LEGO bricks. By the way there is an article about Mitchel Resnick [lego.com] who came up with the design for Mindstorms.
I think you are correct in that Lego in this context is an adjective rather than a noun. It it is the material that you use to build things, similar to the word wood. You would buy 3 planks of wood rather than 3 woods. Similarly you use several lego pieces, and not several legos.
Maybe this is another example of Americans destroying the English language... Even if you did want to make it plural, you would spell it legoes or else the o would be pronounced short has in log rather than long as in hole.
Re:Plural of lego is "lego"! (Score:2)
Not to be inflamitory.
yet another great hack! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:yet another great hack! (Score:1)
From the Matthias Wandel's Link Section [sentex.net]
Slashdot - what a waste of time, but we all read it!
Progress? (Score:3, Informative)
July 2000 Update:
Well, within a year of building this contraption, I bought a digital camera anyways. My first digital camera was an Olympus D340R, bought it in June 1999. Then, in June 2000, I bought a cannon PowerShot S100 (the Digital Elph). Awesome little camera. Haven't used my scanning contraption much, although it is still capable of producing images sharper than what comes out of a 3.3 megapixel digicam.
Garage picture? (Score:1)
Re:Garage picture? (Score:1)
i love his organ (hehe...) (Score:2, Interesting)
Something Similar (Score:2, Funny)
I once had one of those old Logitech hand scanner jobs. So what I did was take the glass top off my stereo cabinet and would use the hand scanner on that to take pictures. It worked surprisingly well, actually. It was only B&W, but the pics were damn near perfect.
I got my GF at the time to take her pants off and squat over the pane of glass...
Yes, I'm being serious...
Re:Something Similar (Score:2, Funny)
You almost rose to the rank of a true geek there, but what a wannabe you are! Real geeks don't have girlfriends. I bet you had sex too, right? Begone! And leave us to our regular expressions.
Re:Something Similar (Score:1)
You almost rose to the rank of a true geek there, but what a wannabe you are! Real geeks don't have girlfriends. I bet you had sex too, right? Begone! And leave us to our regular expressions.
Who says geeks can not have girlfriends or sex? Maybe not with supermodels, but none the less. I am a System and Network Admin for an ISP, program, use Linux/FreeBSD/IRIX/other Unix flavors, that in itself would qualify me to be a full fledged geek. But, I have a girlfriend and am sexually active.
Stereotypes Begone!
r00tdenied
Re:Something Similar (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Something Similar (Score:2)
GF is as in GeForce (I/II/III/IV + nVidia + closed source). Although I don't quite understand that squat thing. And glass? I remember seeing a i387 processor clone that had a plasticky window built over core but..
Oh well, back to coding.
2000x2000 (Score:4, Interesting)
Not being mechanically minded... (Score:1)
Wasp-sucker and marble crossbow (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, you could always package 'em up and mail them to your worst enemy . . .
As for that marble crossbow, that thing is SCARY! Marbles travelling at 150 miles per hour can do some serious damage!
What to do about the wasps (Score:1)
It's the only way to be sure.
Re:Wasp-sucker and marble crossbow (Score:1)
Re:Wasp-sucker and marble crossbow (Score:4, Interesting)
You freeze them overnight. They don't survive. Yellow jackets are a pretty serious problem here in florida, second only to fire ants.
The bug guys down here vacuum them into a tuperware like container, freeze them overnight, and then sell the carcasses to pharmaceutical companies that extract the toxin from each individual stinger to make an antidotes for people that are unfortunate enough to have disturbed a nest.
"...submerge the capture box, something like that."
That actually doesn't work very well. wasps and bees and such don't drown very fast.
--Scott
Re:Wasp-sucker and marble crossbow (Score:1)
We'd wait an hour or so (actually probably only about 15 minutes with the amount of patience we had back then) and then dump them out. They appeared drowned (a-ha foul creature you die!). But alas, in a few minutes they'd just jump to their feet, dry off their wings and fly away . . . bastards.
What a way to waste time.
Re:Wasp-sucker and marble crossbow (Score:2, Interesting)
A bit of kerosene usually does the trick..
Re:Wasp-sucker and marble crossbow (Score:2)
Time on his hands? (Score:2)
Streaking artifact might be "blooming". (Score:4, Interesting)
When the potential well of a CCD pixel is full (a photon hitting the ccd pixel creates an electron-hole pair, and the potential well at the pixel position captures the electrons and depending on the welldepth and wellsize can handle from a few tens of thousand to a few hundredthousand electrons) the electrons start "bleeding" to neighbouring pixels.
This bleeding (AFAIK) always occurs in one direction (in this case horizontal) because the potential bariers in one direction are different in size than in the other direction. In one direction a voltage difference is used, in the other direction physical "channelstops" are used, the n-type semiconducter there is replaced by p-type there and the insulator layer is thickened).
Most modern CCD chips have anti blooming (extra circuitry that gets rid of the excess electrons before they "bleed" away to neighbouring pixels), but I guess that is not needed when you know the maximum amount of light that is going to hit the CCD chip anyway (as is the case in scanners).
Now try and be smart.... (Score:1, Funny)
wasp-vac (Score:1)
Service tunnels kick ass! (Score:1)
When I worked at CERN last summer, discovering the tunnels reminded me of NetHack; in all buildings the floors were numbered, but at some points you could descend the same staircases well below one (where they used certain letters instead). There wasn't any of that fun lock-picking: it's a scientific research facility and nothing is secret. In addition to heat pipes and fat pipes, you could see some 30kV cables going to the accelerators, and vacuum pipes (for protons etc) coming out. Then sometimes there was water leaking on top of them, it made you feel really safe. (Often the radiation safety seemed so bad that all the water there must have been heavy water. You know, the kind which weighs 2kg for every kg.)
Guess I was scared of a power outage, because at some places you had a kilometre of the shoulder-wide tunnel without any exits. Interesting how a kilometre of walking is nothing on the ground, but when the tunnel's so narrow you have to tilt sideways to get through, it feels a lot longer.
About the lock-picking - there were some 'forbidden' doors but you really didn't want to go there. That would be the way to the accelerator, or another highly radiative facility.
By the way, because of how CERN is situated, you could go from Switzerland to France via the tunnels. Which was cool because the French customs officers were being such jerks.
Mad Geniuses... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Mad Geniuses... (Score:2)
Re:The penny-macro shootout (Score:2)
Taken with a Fuji S1 Pro, 55mm micro-Nikkor lens and a bunch of extension tubes.
The sign of a true geek (Score:1)
"...but going through my collection of miscellaneous gears..."
notice the penny? (Score:3, Funny)
just goes to show what can be accomplished when we have snow for so long..
so yep.. this guy did have alot of free time
we're awful people (Score:2)
Actually, not that novel. (Score:2)
The "large-format" camera is a modular system. There is a camera body which holds everything together, a lens (you can figure that one out for yourself) and a back. The back holds the film, or whatever, at a certain spot. The lens focuses the image on the plane where the back is holding the film, and *click*, it exposes the film.
This was designed so the photographer could have a Poloroid back for instant previews, one back with 100 ASA film for slow exposures and so on. With the advent of digital systems, the large format system was a goldmine because the shutter, body and lens were already there. All that had to be developed was the back.
There were (and still are) two types of backs. One has a HUGE ccd there, and is designed for moving subjects. They use low quality CCDs (because the're so big) and they were very expensive.
The other type was much cheaper, and worked like this guy's gadget, by moving a 1 column CCD across the focal plane. One only had to match the resolution in the short axis with a CCD, and then move the CCD with a servo. It would (obviously) only work with a still scene.
Marble machines are cooler (Score:1)
Also glad I found his site and saw links to rolling ball clocks. Used to have one of those as a kid... Now I can have one on my desk annoying co-workers at 12:59:59. Yay! Lunch is over, everybody back to work (kaa-shunk-shunk-shunk!)
Re: (Score:1)
How he took pictures of the camera? (Score:1)
Cool hack... but (Score:1)
Re:Cool hack... but (Score:1)
WAIT, wait WAIT! (Score:2)
How the heck did he take the pictures for the website?! The camera wasn't done yet....
Night-vision (Score:1)
How'd he get the pictures on his website? (Score:2)
First, he says he doesn't have a digicam. Then he goes and trashes his scanner. So how in the world did he get the pictures of the contraption on the website???
Viking cameras (Score:1)
See reference [nasa.gov]