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This DIY digital Box Brownie conversion has built-in WiFi and microSD slot

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The humble Kodak Brownie is one of the most loved and classic cameras ever made. While film has seen a big resurgence over the last few years, the Brownie and many other box cameras like it are still out of commission. We’ve seen new film stocks, sure, but we haven’t seen all of the old formats come back. The Kodak Brownie, in particular, used 117 format film. You can reroll and repurpose 120 format film, but it can be a pain.

So how can you take advantage of Brownie and similar cameras today? Well, you can make them digital, of course. That’s the project that JGJMatt took on with his Kodak Brownie digital conversion. And unlike most DIY camera projects, this one doesn’t use a Raspberry Pi. Instead, it uses the inexpensive (and easily available!) ESP32.

The “Paperoid” is a DIY instant camera uses an e-paper display instead of film

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Polaroid cameras and photographs played a significant role in the development of photography. When they were first released, they were an instant hit because of the “instant” nature of the cameras themselves. You’d point it at your subject, and within minutes you’d have your fully finished print right there in your hands. It’s that same instant gratification that’s driven digital photography, too. But it’s not quite the same.

This is a pretty neat project by “Cameron” that kind of combines the two, allowing you to create a sort of temporary Polaroid of your scene. It uses an e-paper display – which retains its image when power is removed – to show your photograph. This display can be taken off the camera and attached to your fridge or wherever you want to display it without requiring a power source. Then when you want to shoot another picture, you just put it back on the camera.

This DIY e-paper display plays movies in ultra slow motion and would take years to play one back completely

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There seems to be a weird obsession with super slow movie players lately. I’ve seen a few of them come scroll up my screen lately, but this one’s… Well, it kinda takes the cake, with a new frame being rendered about every half an hour. And it uses virtually no power in order to be able to do it, too. It’s based off an ESP32 in “Deep Sleep” mode and draws about 12uA (that’s 0.000012 Amps!). It’s projected that its 2,000mAh battery should last… oh, about 1.2 years.

It’s an interesting way to have a kind of constantly changing photo frame, that progresses one frame through a video sequence at a time in extremely slow fashion. One frame every 30 minutes would means that a movie like The Matrix (just the first one, not the whole trilogy) would take just over eleven years to watch in its entirety. In real-time, the duration of The Matrix is about 2 hours and 16 minutes.

This DIY digital picture frame lets friends send digital postcards from across the world

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Digital picture frames aren’t exactly new technology. Put a bunch of images on an SD card, slot it in and they just cycle through them all to give you a constantly changing display. They’ve been around for years and there are millions of them out there. But this one, created by Cameron on Hackaday is pretty cool. It lets friends send him images across the Internet and it automatically updates with the images that have been sent.

Cameron’s picture frame isn’t colour. Instead, it uses a mono e-ink display. These are great because they retain the image even when no power is being applied to them, which means when they’re not actively changing the picture, they use no energy at all. The brain powering it is an ESP32, which is battery powered and Cameron says it should give several hundred updates on a single charge.

This 3D printed motion control rig offers pro-level features at a DIY-level price

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I’m a big fan of DIY motion control rigs and we’ve featured quite a few here on DIYP before, including this crazy 6-axis (mostly) 3D printed one. But this one from Andreas Epp – who goes by FuzzyLogic on YouTube – is a really slick design. Not only is it a thing of mechanical beauty, but it also seems to rival many commercially available systems out there, too.

Andreas’ motion control system is 3-axis, including a slider and a pan-tilt head. It’s a setup that you wouldn’t expect to be all that difficult. But having had a go at building some myself, they can be quite complex beasts to nail down – especially when you’re relying on 3D printed parts.

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