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How I built my Arduino-powered automatic pan-tilt head for shooting stitched panoramic landscapes

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Shooting multi-frame panorama photographs can be fun, and the resulting images can be striking. But once you get past a panorama that is, say, four or five frames wide, it becomes difficult to do without a tripod. And if you want a panorama that is more than one frame in height, then hand-held is nigh impossible.

There are manual panorama heads you can mount on your tripod, but using one can become a bit tedious, especially shooting a dozen or so frames. They become more onerous when you want a pano that is several rows high.

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This open-source DIY 6-axis motion control rig is almost entirely 3D printed

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The only thing cooler than a 6-axis motion control rig is a DIY 6-axis motion control rig. And the only thing cooler than that is an open-source one that anybody can build and modify to suit their own needs. And that’s exactly what this is from Chris Desrondiers at Do It Whenever? An open-source 6-axis motion control rig that’s made entirely from 3D printed and off-the-shelf parts.

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Make your own automatic 35mm film scanner using an Arduino Nano and Python

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Getting started with Arduino Nano and Python is easy thanks to extensive online documentation and an increasing DIY culture. 

Waiting whilst flatbed scanners scan a colour negative film is nothing to be excited about. This process and the subsequent colour precorrection can take anywhere from an hour to two. Tools available today, such as Negative Lab Pro, make it easy to achieve great colour negative conversions. So fastening the scanning process using a camera makes more sense than ever before. However, the software to automate this process so far did not exist. Until today!

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This guy created an Open Source DIY digital camera – including a 1-kilopixel sensor

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Digital cameras have become so high resolution these days that you might wonder why somebody would want to build one of their own from scratch with a resolution that’s not even a fraction of what digital cameras could do a decade ago. But some things just need to be done because they’re fun.

YouTuber Sean Hodgins has been working on this idea for a long time, and now he’s finally made and released a 1-kilopixel DIY camera. He’s also released the files as Open Source so you can download and make your own, too.

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I made my own digital camera using an Arduino, a projector and a photoresistor

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The Flying Pixel Portrait Camera uses a video beamer, a single photoresistor, an Arduino and a PC for taking photos of people’s faces. The beamer ‘scans’ the image by projecting a small white square onto a person’s face inside an otherwise completely dark chamber. While the projected square slowly moves over the entire face, the photoresistor captures the reflected luminosities.

This generates a proportional analog electric signal which is digitized by an Arduino and transmitted to the PC. As the PC also controls the position of the projected square, it can now construct an image based on the different brightness values that it receives, one pixel at a time.

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How Photograph Flowers Splashing in Milk with an Infrared Laser

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My Students came up with an idea to drop flowers into a pan of milk after they saw several pictures on Instagram. The students decided to create a technique for getting the perfect picture by eliminating all trial and error. The students created the following technique and were able to photograph over 70 photos, successfully capturing the splash every time.

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Make your own DIY Loupedeck for Lightroom from an Arduino

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Control decks for Lightroom and other applications seem to be becoming all the rage these days. And for good reason. I’ve got the Loupedeck+, you can check out the review here, and it’s becoming a pretty valuable tool. More so for me if they ever add DaVinci Resolve support, though.

But what if you already have an Arduino and a bunch of components laying around and want to save some money? What if you just want to tinker and learn and play around with it for yourself? Well, for that, meet LRduino.

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This DIY interactive globe helps you quickly browse your travel photos

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One of the biggest advantages of mobile photography for me is geotagging. An iPhone has been my go-to location scouting camera for about the past five years now. In an instant I can bring up a map of the world. Then scroll through it to find my images and where I shot them. More recently, I’ve switched over to using a DSLR with built in GPS. Flicking through Google maps with a mouse is ok, but it’s just not the same.

Well, Switzerland based designer by the name of Caroline Buttet has come up with an amazing solution. She’s made her own interactive touch-sensitive globe that controls the images shown on her monitor. All you do is tap the country you want to see, then spin the globe to browse the images.

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How to trigger your studio flash from a computer using an Arduino

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I needed a way to trigger a flash from an Electron app, but there wasn’t anything out there that suited my needs. At first I thought there would be a flash with a simple bluetooth interface, and there is. Unfortunately none of these flashes have a public API, and some even go to the trouble of encrypting their bluetooth messages. What the heck?!

I don’t have much experience with Arduino development, or electronics in general, but the market forced me into it! Fortunately this project is about as simple as it gets. If this is your first time tinkering with Arduino, it’s a good place to start.

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Build your own 3D printed DIY LED ringlight for your smartphone

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The problem with mobile phones is that if you need lights, you’ve usually got two options. The first is to simply deal with the underpowered, far-too-close-to-the-lens built in LED. Unless you’re using in the front camera, in which case that’s usually not an option. The second is to lug around all the usual LED lighting gear you’d use with regular cameras. In which case, you probably might as well just use a regular camera.

The folks over at Adafruit, though, have come up with a great project to help solve this. A 3D printed smartphone case with a built in LED ringlight. Not only does it wrap the light around your lens instead of being right next to it, but it also offers a fair bit more power. That it’s controlled by an Arduino also means that you can reconfigure the lights to give some neat effects.

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