Using Video Glasses As A Camera Viewfinder Is Harder Than It Looks

July 29, 2026 by Donald Papp 7 Comments

[John Dingley] has a Sony ZV-E10 camera that is excellent, but the design lacks a built-in electronic viewfinder. This means it relies entirely on its rear-mounted touchscreen for framing shots. This is troublesome because [John] often films in bright sunlight, and sometimes from a perspective other than normal eye level. His solution? Use a pair of XREAL video glasses as a handsfree viewfinder.

The XREAL glasses look a bit unusual, but they can be worn and used like regular sunglasses. They accept external video and importantly, allow the wearer to see the video feed while still having awareness of their surroundings. Seems like a perfect match for the camera, but as [John] discovered, there are quite a few implementation hurdles involved.

For starters, the camera and glasses do not speak the same format. The camera outputs HDMI via a distressingly fragile micro-HDMI connector, but the glasses accept video over USB-C (aka DisplayPort altmode). Connectors and cables and a converter will be involved, as well as a power bank because the glasses and converter will require a power supply. As any hacker knows, wires and connectors can eat up space very quickly.

To solve all this, [John] carefully selected off-the-shelf components chosen to minimize bulk and designed a custom camera cage to hold things cleanly without obstructing the camera’s microphone port. The end result is very tidy package that presents a single USB-C connection point between the glasses and the camera, requires no hardware modifications or soldering, and even takes the strain off the fragile connector on the ZV-E10.

The finishing touch is putting a neck strap on the XREAL glasses, allowing them to be easily donned and doffed as needed while filming. Check it out the video, embedded just below the page break.

When it comes to filming vehicles it often makes sense to film from a low perspective. The camera has a handle for this purpose, but the process is much better now that the glasses can act as a viewfinder. [John] has a soft spot for vehicles, including self-balancing unicycles or monotracks of his own design.

Continue reading “Using Video Glasses As A Camera Viewfinder Is Harder Than It Looks” →

Thingino Teaches Cheap IP Cameras New Tricks

July 29, 2026 by Tom Nardi 20 Comments

I recently found myself in the market for a few IP cameras to keep an eye on my Prusa 3D printers, and quickly found that the options on the market weren’t exactly ideal. Prusa does offer up an official camera, but the price for a pair of them was a bit more than I wanted to spend on the project. Conversely, there’s no shortage of cheap network-connected cameras available online, but they come with expenses of a different sort, namely proprietary software and cloud services I didn’t want or need.

Somewhere in the deep and dark recesses of this particular rabbit hole, I came across a Reddit post mentioning how a camera running the community-developed Thingino firmware could be plugged into Prusa’s remote printer monitoring scheme. It wasn’t a project I’d heard of previously, and sure enough, a search of the Hackaday back catalog showed we’d never come across it before.

My interest was already piqued, but the discovery that I already owned a supported camera sealed the deal. It was time to explore a new entry in one of my absolute favorite project categories: an open source replacement firmware that turns a cheap consumer device into something more than the sum of its parts.

Continue reading “Thingino Teaches Cheap IP Cameras New Tricks” →

An image of skyscrapers over a bay is shown, with some foliage along the bank. The sky and water are a pale blue-grey, while the foliage is pink.

Taking Tri-Camera True-Color Infrared Videos

July 25, 2026 by Aaron Beckendorf 29 Comments

Silicon-based CMOS camera sensors are cheap and plentiful, but they’re rarely used to their full potential: they can detect a greater range of wavelengths in the infrared spectrum than they can in the visible spectrum, but in most cameras this is blocked by an IR-cut filter. [Project 326]’s infrared camera system reverses this: it records infrared images in color while blocking out visible light.

The system uses three USB webcams, each with its IR cut filter removed and replaced with a different dichroic IR band-pass filter. One filter is centered at 750 nm, one at 850 nm, and one at 940 nm. There is no band overlap; in testing, each camera only detected an infrared flashlight tuned to its own filter wavelength. The original cameras didn’t hold the sensors in a consistent position, so [Project 326] designed new housings. Using three lenses, each with distinct aberrations, introduced some difficulties in alignment. [Project 326] originally intended to use a pair of beam-splitting prisms with only one lens, but this proved too difficult to align using 3D-printed frames.

A Raspberry Pi records a separate monochromatic stream from each camera, which can then be processed into a composite color video. The first frames need to be manually aligned, but afterwards a script can apply the alignment to the rest of the video. Finally, the channels are mapped to colors, with the precise mapping being freely changeable. There were some few unexpected issues: each camera has its own, not terribly precise, local oscillator, and they drifted apart by about one or two frames per minute. Parallax error, on the other hand, was less severe than might be expected: at close range it’s noticeable, but by a distance of 35 meters, it represents less than one pixel of distortion.

The resulting images look great, and it’s easy to forget that they’re being captured without the use of any visible light. We’ve seen a similar technique (though extending into the visible range) used to recreate the surreal effect of Aerochrome film.

Repairing A RED Cinema Camera On The Cheap

July 25, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 13 Comments

[ALT CINE] took a punt recently when purchasing a damaged RED Komodo camera online. In functional form, the 6K-capable camera sells for several thousand pounds (or dollars, or euros), whether used or brand new. However, [ALT CINE] was able to score the damaged unit for just £700. The question was—could it be repaired and turned back into a functional camera?

Things looked promising from the drop. The camera had just 3 hours of usage recorded in the firmware, and the casing seemed to suggest it had little use. However, the problem was soon revealed to be serious as the image sensor itself appeared to be damaged. Some research provided hope though—that the damage could be limited to a glass layer in front of the sensor itself that had delaminated.

Thankfully, disassembling the camera was easy enough thanks to its modular design, and [ALT CINE] soon had the sensor block on the bench for further examination. The cause of the issue was apparent—overzealous cleaning leading to fluid getting stuck to the rear of the filter in front of the sensor. Simply popping off the filter, cleaning and drying it properly, and reassembling, was enough to get the camera back to fully operational status.

RED’s repair service quoted $695 for a glass filter swap and $1,395 for a full sensor change. In contrast, [ALT CINE] was able to demonstrate that this repair was something easily within the realm of an intermediate camera tinkerer and it cost almost nothing to achieve. The video also covers an alternative potential repair route, wherein a DSMC2 filter can be subbed into a Komodo camera if the damage to the filter glass is otherwise unrecoverable.

It’s rare to get this lucky when it comes to repairing big-dollar cinema cameras like this one. We’ve featured some other great deep-dive camera repairs before, too. Continue reading “Repairing A RED Cinema Camera On The Cheap” →

Overpowered RC Car + Gimbal Cam = The Greatest Chase Vehicle We’ve Ever Seen

July 9, 2026 by Tyler August 8 Comments

Modern cinema relies very heavily on quadrotor drones, because they make for very smooth, very easy to position platforms. From slow pans to chase shots, drones are great– if your shots can be taken at a high enough altitude. Close to the ground, things get a bit dodgier. That’s where [Transistor Man]’s camera chase vehicle comes in— it’s a rover, so it excels close to the ground. In fact, it can’t go anywhere else, except perhaps if provided with a jump. It’s got a hefty gimbal to hold the camera steady on any terrain, a decade-old surplus radio to provide full HD FPV to the remote driver, and a powerful 1/5th scale radio control rally chassis to make it all go. Plus googly eyes, because everything is better with googly eyes.

It looks like an enormous amount of fun to drive, but more importantly it provides smooth, cinematic shots from the professional Sony camera held in the gimbal. One big takeaway is that when 3D printing something that will bounce around this much, you can’t rely on pure strength– flexible filaments are your friend. Just about everything printed ended up remade in TPU if it didn’t start that way. The other takeaway is that we’ve reached enough of a technological plateau that if you scrounge around, you can build something to take a top-of-the-line footage with decade-old castoffs, like the gimbal and radio used in this project, which is a great thing for hobbyists and small studios.

If you can’t find surplus, you could always DIY a gimbal. We’re not filmmakers, but we find ourselves wondering how shots made with this rover would compare to a camera slider.

Process 4 Billion Pixels Per Second From 16 DIY Cameras For The Best V-Tubing Rig Ever

June 10, 2026 by Tyler August 24 Comments

[Dennis] is on YouTube with his channel “Made By Dennis,” but for the record he is a maker, not a V-tuber. On the other hand, his latest project– creating a profesisonal-level tracking rig with DIY IR cameras and a whole lot of moxie–does mean he’s now equipped to make the move to the prestigious, high-status world of pretending to be an anime girl.

That is of course not why he did it. Like most projects around here, the motivation was more a case of “I wonder if I can…”– in this case [Dennis] wondered what it would take for him to pull off the same sort of optical motion capture, or MoCap, that is used in Hollywood studios. Optical mocap has the advantage of being very precise, able to track things at high speeds, and not being in any way limited to the human form like the slew of AI-assisted methods hitting the market right now. The disatvantage is that you need to place markers on any part of your subject you want tracked, film them from all angles, and process a whole lot of pixels. In [Dennis]’s case, it ended up being about four billion. Keeping in mind that actually locating those points in 3D space is dependent on knowing exactly where your cameras are: if you want sub-millimeter precision, your cameras need to be fixed with sub-millimeter tolerance. It’s a big project, hence a long video, which is embedded below.

The DIY cameras use a AR0234 MIPI camera on a custom PCB with M12 lenses and IR filters. To improve the signal-to-noise ratio on optical MoCap, it’s standard to use near-IR light. The camera boards, as you might expect given the MIPI interface, hook into Raspberry Pi compute modules– the cheapest CM4 should work, though he’s using CM5s. The compute modules sit on custom boards that provide PoE, and some other niceties– like a small microcontroller driven by the pulse-per-second pin to help trigger the cameras in sync.

Each camera gets a ring light of near-IR LEDs that pulse at 160 W, which would be way more than PoE is specced to provide, but since the LEDs are only on when the camera is taking a frame, the average power is well within allowable limits. With 16 cameras each having their own ring light, that’s a lot of near-IR photons. Don’t forget your safety squints!

Rather than process the images with OpenCV, he has his own custom solution optimized for this use-case that [Dennis] reports is 300x faster. Luckily, he’s put his implementation on GitHub, along with the rest of the project. Even if you don’t have any v-tubing ambitions, this project is very impressive and worth checking out in its entirety.

Optical MoCap isn’t the only game in town, of course. If you want to do this cheap and easy, you can strap a bunch of IMU sensors to yourself– just don’t expect the same precision.

Thanks to [Dennis] for the tip!

Continue reading “Process 4 Billion Pixels Per Second From 16 DIY Cameras For The Best V-Tubing Rig Ever” →

Using A Mirror To 3D Scan Both Sides Of An Object At Once

June 2, 2026 by Donald Papp 28 Comments

Photogrammetry is the process of 3D scanning an object by taking a lot of photographs, then using software to turn those into a 3D model. But the process can only scan what the camera can see, and one can’t always get a good view of every part of an object. To solve this, [Thomas Megel] shared an experiment in using a mirror to capture the underside of an object simultaneously with its top. The results were encouraging!

Using a mirror as the turntable allows the camera to image the underside at the same time.

To do this he perched a small tabletop gaming mini on a mirror serving as a turntable platform in his self-designed OpenScan Mini machine, which is designed to take highly structured photos of small objects for scanning purposes. This produced a single scan with two objects, the original and its mirror image, together in one file.

Aligning separate models and combining them into one is a common way to deal with partial or incomplete scans. The idea here is to get two scans at once, instead of separately with a reposition of the object in between. Additionally, it should be possible for the software to automatically separate, align, and combine the two since it is known exactly where the mirror plane is.

As far as a proof of concept, it’s encouraging. [Thomas] is still playing with the idea and looking for suggestions, so if you have any insights be sure to share them.

3D scanning can be a very useful tool, and while photogrammetry can be done with little more than your mobile phone’s camera, in some ways the concept is over a hundred years old.