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Darktable developers preparing to ditch macOS support

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This is not the news that anybody wants to really hear, but it looks like Lightroom alternative Darktable may no longer be available on the Mac soon. According to the developers of the software, it’s just getting too difficult to keep up. While Darktable is an open-source project with contributors in the community, for the last ten years, maintaining and compiling the Mac versions of Darktable has been down to a single person.

That person has done a wonderful job of keeping up with things for the last decade, but now he’s ready to move on and pass the mantle on to somebody else. This means that the next stable release of Darktable, version 4.2.1, is probably going to be the last one available for the Mac – unless they can find a replacement.

This 3D printed 163mm f/2.5 lens with built-in aperture and focus adjustments can be made for less than $15

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When it comes to 3D printed lenses, they usually suffer from some limitations that manufactured lenses do not. Two of those limitations specifically are the lack of a variable aperture that can be stopped down and focus adjustment. Some 3D printed lenses get around the focus issue by using a commercially available helicoid lens adapter. And to solve the aperture problem, they may have swappable inserts.

Well, this 163mm f/2.5 3D printed telephoto lens from Felix Steel at Pixels and Prisms features both a fully adjustable 12-blade diaphragm aperture (a first for full-frame 3D printed lenses) as well as a manual focusing mechanism that can lock in the fully extended or fully retracted positions. Aside from the glass, it’s 100% 3D printed and can be built for less than $15. It’s also open source.

OpenRefMic is a cheap open source low-noise reference microphone you can build yourself for under $40

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Reference mics can be a vital tool when it comes to audio. They’re the microphones that capture the uncoloured sound, with a flat response and almost complete transparency to let you measure the acoustic characteristics of the room in which you’re recording. They let you test rooms for echo and reverberation. They let you hear (and see, on charts) what frequencies your room naturally enhances or destroys.

Reference mics can be quite expensive, though, so GitHub user loudifier decided to design his own and make it open source. It’s called OpenRefMic and it promises a low cost with a high performance that “meets or exceeds the performance of professional reference microphones”. And while commercially available reference microphones aren’t all expensive, they usually come with pretty high self-noise levels. And none are this cheap!

This DIY USB camera features interchangeable lenses and sensors, and is completely open source

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There aren’t too many cameras out there in the Open Source world. At least, not digital ones and certainly not digital ones with interchangeable lenses and sensors. There are a few but not many! And this project from electronics engineer Gaurav Singh is one of them. An open-source USB 3.0 camera with interchangeable lenses, thanks to a built-in C mount, as well as interchangeable sensors.

The camera communicates with its host over Type-C USB and is designed primarily for industrial use. It’s extremely compact, fitting everything onto just three tiny 27 x 27mm (a little over one-inch square) circuit boards. One is the USB controller that communicates with your PC, one is for the sensor for collecting the image data and sandwiched between them is an FPGA core module that allows one to talk to the other.

Darktable just dropped 3.4.0 with improved tethering and live histogram, and color calibration

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Darktable has just released its 3.4.0 version. As always, it’s completely free and available for Windows, iOS, and Linux. The open-source alternative to Lightroom has been more and more popular among photographers, and the new version brings a bunch of improvements. Some of them are improved tethering and live histogram, as well as color calibration. So let’s dive in and see what you get when you install Darktable 3.4.0.

How I created my own DIY camera timer for $50

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A must have tool when shooting the night sky is a remote release trigger for your camera. Triggers range from very simple cable releases over phone apps that connect to your camera’s Wifi to very specialized Intervalometers. I tried the phone apps for my cameras and they miss a very basic feature: bulb mode timing. Meaning, when you set the camera to bulb mode and start the exposure, most apps do not display how long the shutter is open already. It also eats battery life from the camera as Wifi or bluetooth needs to be on on the camera. In the mid range there are Intervalometers that can be programmed through a small display and some buttons and usually work quite well.

The Scura is an open-source curved panoramic 3D printed pinhole camera

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3D printed cameras are a lot of fun, and something I was planning to make a bunch of this year before we were told we weren’t allowed to go out and play. But despite most of us not being able to get out to shoot our cameras right now, it hasn’t stopped people developing new ones.

You might remember Dora Goodman, creator of the Goodman One 3D printed medium format camera. Well, now she’s back with the Scura, a new open-source 3D printed curved panoramic pinhole camera.

The Octopus is a 5K full frame open source camera that lets you swap out sensors

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Now that digital imaging sensors are starting to become more freely available to the masses, all kinds of open source projects have been popping up that use them. Most of them are typically fairly limited to things like the Raspberry Pi or development boards like the Arduino and ESP32.

But now, there is a new and pretty serious looking open source camera out there. It’s called the Octopus, it has interchangeable sensors that go up to 5K full frame, it’s fully programmable and runs on the open source operating system, Linux.

The Triggertrap apps for iOS and Android are now Open Source

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When it was announced that Triggertrap would be winding down its business, many users expressed concern. What would happen to the apps? Will they be updated? Or will the hardware they’ve bought and paid for suddenly become useless? The common suggestion was to make it open source.

A couple of weeks ago we reported that the Triggertrap Mobile dongle had indeed been made open source hardware. Now, they’ve followed along with the software. The Triggertrap apps for both iOS and Android have now been released. They’re completely open source and available on Github (iOS / Android).

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