Notices by Trevor Flowers (trevorflowers@machines.social), page 2

This is your friendly reminder that I make and sell delightful miniature retrocomputers like TRS-80s, Osborne Ones, and the occasional big friends like Connection Machines and Crays.
I'm a retired nerd who's living the dream. Well, if your dream is working in your garage on tiny art machines. 😺 ⚙️
#retrocomputing #miniatures #trs80 #cray #shamelessSelfPromotion
https://store.transmutable.com/

It's funny when people using the most common units believe that people in the US don't understand their units.

I can assure you that ~every nerd in the US converts between units on the regular. If we care about your measurements then we will convert them.

The people complaining about your units are either ignorant, performing outrage, or both. Feel free to ignore them.

This is a thoughtful piece about the balancing act of making physical things. How long should they work? What do recycling, repair, and durability bring to the equation? Whether you're making one-offs or runs of 110k, I think this is worth your time.
#manufacturing #machining
https://www.core77.com/posts/132088/Fantastic-Industrial-Design-Student-Work-How-Long-Should-Objects-Last

Friends, if Microsoft tries to squeeze you to buy a new computer to run version 11 when every new version of Windows gets worse and adds ads then please consider that more than 100 million people use Linux on their desktop computer, including people who make all sorts of projects with videos, illustrations, digital photographs, laser cuttings, animations, paper media, CAD, CAM, 3D printed stuff, circuit boards, etc.
Will it be exactly the same as Windows? No.
Can it be awesome? Yes.

When a rich person talks about all of the rich welders, send them this link. It's behind a paywall so the image (and description) shows a key paragraph.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/09/welding-doesnt-pay-as-well-as-republicans-think/597733/

TIL that Send Cut Send now waterjet cut phenolic (AKA micarta) which I suspect will feel nice as the top and bottom plates of my camera. Instead of that cold steel feel it'll be pressed linen.

Playing around with a new body shape for my ding dang cam. I plan to assemble prototype 02 using the previous body design but it's interesting to think about taking advantage of the blobject creation abilities of 3D printers.
#mdc

One could build a pretty cool "deck of cards" sized networked camera with these parts:
sensor: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5838
display: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5872
MCU: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5323
battery: https://www.adafruit.com/product/353
There would be a little soldering to connect the camera module to the MCU but AFAICT all of the hardware (camera, radios, display, touch...) is nicely supported by CircuitPython on the Espressif SoC and the board has power management, including charging via USB-C.

Maybe with one of the new wave of little boards that pair a SoC with a ML accelerator. They're mostly targeted at IoT but a camera can be a T on the I, right?
https://www.hackster.io/news/ov-tech-s-pi-mx8-offers-a-raspberry-pi-compute-module-4-alternative-with-on-board-ai-acceleration-4a377e1fdb7b

I'm waiting on a few deliveries of parts so my mind is turning to the software running during photo shoots. I'm leaning toward writing it on top of pygame (https://www.pygame.org/wiki/about) as it has reasonable camera support and a healthy menu lib (https://pygame-menu.readthedocs.io/). Pygame can write directly to a linux framebuffer displayed via a SPI- or 8bit bus-driven display panel.

The initial control hardware is:
📸 480w320h 3.5" TFT with touch (https://www.adafruit.com/product/5846)
📸 Pi Zero 2 W running Pi OS Lite (https://www.adafruit.com/product/5291)
📸 Wearing an EyeSPI and I2C port hat (https://www.adafruit.com/product/5783)
📸 Pi Cam v2 (https://www.adafruit.com/product/3099) though a better module is in transit
📸 Powered by 3.7V 4400mAh LIon batts (https://www.adafruit.com/product/354)
📸 A charge and boost board (https://www.adafruit.com/product/2465)

Here's the shell filled with a RPi. a couple of 18650 cells, cheap-o speaker and mic modules, a 2.7" diagonal touchscreen, and a sensor module that takes up roughly the shape of an APS-C sensor and a lens mount compatible with the Sony emount lenses. I'll need to add in a charger/booster board, cable ports, etc but these are the big space-fillers. The transparent rods will be steel tapped on either end and the internal modules will be fixed to them. The top and bottom plates are laser cut metal.

Ok, here's where my head is on the topic of an open vlogger's camera. I've designed a shell that will fit a variety of SBCs, sensor & lens combos, custom input systems, power sources, and rear display panels. The FreeCAD source file is to a large extent parametrically driven so that the shell can be rearranged for different dimensions without too much fuss. The idea is to take care of the fiddly camera bits and make it easily hackable for personal preferences.
#mdc #openHardware #FreeCAD

I used those internal parts as an example because that's what I happen to have in stock but the idea is that the shell can be repurposed without too much futzing for entirely different components up and down the quality and capability spectrum. There are a metric boatload of companies who sell sensor & lens packages that can, with a bit of CAD work and sometimes a custom adapter board, integrate into this setup. Perhaps we can adapt some of the Apertus modules. It's an open field.

It blows me away that for ~$20 I can get a generally available image sensor capable of producing HD video. That's the single unit price, too. I'm sure it's not the best video but dang that's still kind of amazing.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/onsemi/AR0330CM1C21SHKA0-CR/5321546

I started a Hackaday project to track what I'm certain will be sporadic progress on this camera. I named it "My Dang Camera" (#mdc) because I enjoy open hardware that I own instead of the physical projections of hypercorps into my life. It's all mine mine mine! 😺
Also, I want to learn more about hackable camera sensor and lens standards so a modular and mutable camera body seems like a good start down that road.
#openHardware #mechatronics
https://hackaday.io/project/194160-my-dang-camera

Modern MCU dev boards are so dang powerful and have snazzy power management so I'm pretty sure I could put a little one in there, hook it up to a short focal length sensor module like the HQ RPi cam, and then fill the rest of the space with batteries and storage to create a camera that rarely needs to be charged or emptied. Or we could make it a network-centric device for streamers. Or, or, or....
I want the outer form to be specific enough to be good but open enough to be a personal fav.

It just occurred to me that I could put a VUI in this thing and train it to go hard on my photos.
me: *snaps pic of squirrel in tree*
mdc: "Come now, not only is that a trite subject but your framing is ridiculous. Shall I fix it for you?"

First dry fit!
I'm waiting on a few deliveries of metal parts and a camera sensor + lens module but I'm impatient so I printed the metal parts in PLA and used carpet tape to fit everything in place. The front blue panel has a Pi cam v2 taped into it as a placeholder until better hw arrives.
#mdc #3DPrinting #photography

TIL about OpenTimelineIO, a JSON syntax for interchange of video editor timelines. Now I want a function on my camera that moves all of the currently stored photos and video to my NAS and emits a chronological timeline of those files that I can import into kdenlive.
https://opentimelineio.readthedocs.io/