2026-02-21 05:00:19
Even though digital cameras have lowered the barrier of entry to photography dramatically, as well as made it much easier for professionals and amateurs alike to capture stunning images without the burden of developing film, the technology behind them is considerably more complex than their analog counterparts. In fact, an analog film camera (not counting the lens) can be as simple as a lightproof box and a way to activate a shutter. Knowing that, any kind of film camera could be built for any number of applications, like this 3D-printed panoramic camera from [Denis Aminev].
The custom-built camera works by taking a standard roll of 35mm film, which is standardized to take 36 pictures, and exposing a wider section of the film to create a panorama. This reduces the number of pictures on the roll to 19. This is the fifth version of this camera, called the Infidex 176 V, and has everything a standard film camera would have, from an exposure counter, pressure plate for the film, a winder, interchangable lenses, a viewfinder, and a tripod mounting point. It does take a bit of work to assemble, as shown in the video linked below, but the final result is impressive and delivers a custom finished product not easily found or reproducible in off-the-shelf cameras.
The path to creating this camera was interesting as well, as [Denis]’s first custom film camera was a pinhole camera. From there he moved on to disassembling an SLR camera and attempting to reproduce all of its parts with 3D printed ones. With that in hand, he was able to modify this design into this panoramic camera which he likes because it reproduces the feel of widescreen movies. Although this camera reproduces all of the bells and whistles of a high quality analog camera, not all of these features are strictly necessary for taking pictures on film. Have a look at this minimum viable camera as well.
2026-02-21 03:30:40
Considering that the Nintendo DS already has its own remake of Super Mario 64, one might be tempted to think that porting the original Nintendo 64 version would be a snap. Why you’d want to do this is left as an exercise to the reader, but whether due to nostalgia or out of sheer spite, the question of how easy this would be remains. Correspondingly, [Tobi] figured that he’d give it a shake, with interesting results.
Of note is that someone else already ported SM64 to the DSi, which is a later version of the DS with more processing power, more RAM and other changes. The reason why the 16 MB of RAM of the DSi is required, is because it needs to load the entire game into RAM, rather than do on-demand reads from the cartridge. This is why the N64 made do with just 4 MB of RAM, which is as much RAM as the NDS has. Ergo it can be made to work.
The key here is NitroFS, which allows you to implement a similar kind of segmented loading as the N64 uses. Using this the [Hydr8gon] DSi port could be taken as the basis and crammed into NitroFS, enabling the game to mostly run smoothly on the original DS.
There are still some ongoing issues before the project will be released, mostly related to sound support and general stability. If you have a flash cartridge for the DS this means that soon you too should be able to play the original SM64 on real hardware as though it’s a quaint portable N64.
2026-02-21 01:40:52
For today’s podcast Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List, and we’re pushing the limits of mobile connectivity as Jenny’s coming to us from a North Sea ferry. We start by looking forward to the upcoming Hackaday Europe, with a new location in Lecco, Italy. We hope you can join us there!
There’s a bumper collection of hacks to talk about, with a novel soft pneumatic display, a CRT-based VR headset, an LCD photographic aperture, and a novel time-of-flight sensor array in the line-up.Then there are 3D printed PCBs, Scotch tape for a lens, and a project to map farts. We kid you not. Finally we wrap up with mind controlled toys, and a a treatise on requirements and specifications in an age of AI.
Or download it yourself in glorious 192 kbps MP3.
2026-02-21 01:31:42
Magnet placement tools are great because they remove finger fumbling while ensuring correct polarity every time. [EmGi] has made a further improvement by making a version that auto-feeds from an internal stack of magnets.
That is a trickier task than one might imagine, because magnets can have a pesky habit of being attracted in inconvenient ways, or flipping around and sticking where they should not. [EmGi] solves this with a clever rack and pinion mechanism to turn a single plunger press into a motion that shears one magnet from a stack and keeps it constrained while the same magnet responsible for holding it to the tip takes care of dragging it down a feed path. It’s easier to see it work in action, so check out the video (embedded below) in which [EmGi] explains exactly what is going on.
This design is actually an evolution of an earlier, non-reloading version. This new one is mechanically more complex, but if it looks useful you can get the design files from Printables or Makerworld and make your own.
The only catch is that this reloading design is limited in what sizes of magnet it can handle, because magnet behavior during feeding is highly dependent on the physical layout and movements. For a different non-reloading placement tool that works with any magnet size and is about as simple as one can get, you can make your own with little more than a bolt and a spring.
Thanks [Keith] for the tip!
2026-02-21 00:30:27
There was a period from the 1970s to the mid-2000s or so when a fixture underneath the family TV set was a VHS videocassette recorder. These were a masterpiece of cramming a color video signal into the restricted bandwidth of an affordable 1970s helical-scan tape deck, which was achieved by clever use of frequency shifting and FM carrier modulation. Very few of us will have had the ultimate iteration of the VHS format though, W-VHS, which managed the same trick but with HD video. But how? [Superchromat] is here with the answer.
W-VHS used a frequency modulated carrier, but instead of splitting luminance and chrominance in the frequency domain like its VHS ancestor, it did so in the time domain in the same way as some 1980s satellite TV standards did. Each line first contained the color information, then the brightness. Thus it sacrificed some color resolution and a little horizontal image resolution, but kept a much higher vertical image resolution. In the video below the break we go into significant detail about the compromises required to pull this off, and if you watch it through you’ll learn something about magnetic tape recording as well as FM.
The W-VHS standard is largely forgotten now as a last hurrah for the format, but it’s still in the sights of the VHS Decode project. The work in this video is helping them retrieve the highest quality images from these tapes, by capturing the raw RF from the heads and using DSP techniques to decode them.
2026-02-20 23:00:13
During the Cold War, the specter of a nuclear “dead man’s switch” was central to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). In the event that one side was annihilated by the other, an automated system would be triggered to deliver a revenge strike that would ultimately destroy the attacker. It was the ultimate defense, as your enemy will never attack if they know doing so will inevitably lead to their own destruction.
The same idea has occasionally been employed by whistleblowers and journalists as well. Should the individual fail to check in regularly, a series of predetermined events will be set into motion. Again, the idea is defensive in nature. If somebody is in possession of information so damning that they could be abducted or even killed to keep it quiet, making arrangements to have that information be released to the public in the event anything should happen to them is a great way to stay safe.
But what about for the average person? In the past, there was no need for most people to think about something as elaborate as a dead man’s switch. But we live in interesting times, to say the least. In an information society such as ours, whistleblowers have never been more common, and the Internet has significantly blurred the definition of what it means to be a journalist.
For those living under a repressive regime or in a war zone, simply posting to social media can provide the outside world with an unfiltered look at what’s actually happening on the ground. A teenager with a cell phone has the potential to reach a wider audience than the legacy media — a powerful, but dangerous, proposition.
Even if you’re not in the middle of political upheaval, there are still reasons you might want to have previously secret information made available in the event of your death or incapacitation. Perhaps you’d like to send your loved ones a final personal message, or make sure the passwords for all your accounts get in the hands of whoever will be handling your estate.
Of course, one could argue that could be accomplished with little more than a notebook hidden in your sock drawer. But this is Hackaday, and over-engineering is the name of the game. So do you have a dead man’s switch? How is it implemented? Or is the whole idea just a bit too out there for you?
We started discussing this topic internally here at Hackaday a few days ago after I came across LastSignal, an open source dead man’s switch application written by Claudio Benvenuti. It’s by no means the first piece of software of its type, as the idea has been floating around for years and there are both open and proprietary implementations available. But LastSignal has the sort of slick modern design that gets people interested, and the fact that you can self-host it is quite appealing.
LastSignal is designed to let you write encrypted messages that will remain a secret until the system has been triggered, at which point they will be sent off to the recipients you’ve configured. The default behavior is to try and contact you every month via your primary email address, and once the software picks up that you’ve missed enough of your normal check-ins, it will try to get in touch with your emergency contact. If it still doesn’t get a response, then the automated messages start getting sent out.
Again, this is not a new idea. Searching around, you can find other open source tools to achieve the same goal, such as dead-man-hand. If you’re not concerned with the behind-the-scenes implementation, you can even pay a service to handle it all for you. But there is something to be said for using a package that’s already been thoroughly tested and vetted by the community. Otherwise, you could just throw something together yourself with a Python script — although we’d hate to spend eternity roaming the astral plain in torment because our final messages didn’t get delivered due to a library update breaking our script.
Most of the projects we found along these lines are focused on sending messages that would be a secret until the time of their release. That makes sense, but we wondered if there were other tasks you might like your personal dead man’s switch to fire off in the event you’ve signed out permanently. For example, Al Williams suggested that some users might want to have their drives securely wiped in the event of their death. Any speculation as to why this was the first thing Al thought of will be left as an exercise for the reader.
While a software solution is the easiest way to implement a dead man’s switch, it does have its downsides. As already mentioned, if you’re self-hosting the solution and aren’t careful, some seemingly inconsequential change or update could potentially knock out the software before it even has a chance to run. When we think of all the weirdo software issues we’ve had over the years, it makes us more than a little skeptical about trusting such an important task to the whims of our operating system.
So what about a hardware solution? With so many WiFi capable microcontrollers on the market now, it would be trivial to put together a little dead man box that has just a display and a button on it — the display counts down the remaining time before the switch is triggered, and the button is used to reset the timer. If you don’t press the button in time, the MCU connects to the Internet and performs whatever task you’ve programmed. We bet you could put it together right now using stuff in your parts bin.
Now, we won’t pretend going from a pure software solution to a piece of custom hardware will completely remove the chances of something going wrong. After all, there’s still code being run, and that code could have bugs. But it does take away the innumerable variables that are introduced when said code is being run on a modern operating system. If your DIY dead man’s switch works today, you can be sure it will work the same way in a year from now as the whole system is in a fixed state.
Or maybe this is all crazy talk. Perhaps the complexity of either solution makes no sense for the average person, and just writing your important information down and telling your next of kin how to get access it after your passing is enough. Obviously there are downsides to this approach as well, notably the potential for your written information to get stale and no longer be valid when the time comes, but it’s a method that has worked for the vast majority of people for generations.
Is this a problem that needs a modern solution? Is a dead man’s switch best left to secret agents? The fact is, we’re all going to go sooner or later, so it’s something we need to give some thought to while we still have the chance. We’d love to hear what you think in the comments below.
