Taking great pictures means making them more vibrant enhancing saturation and contrast. Ynformatic has published some tips to help you do that by creating a DIY device to control a polarizer using an Arduino Pro Mini, an iPhone, and a screen from an auto-darkening welder’s mask.

A phototransistor located facing the iPhone’s flashlight LED is connected to both an external interrupt pin and an analog pin. Short pulses on the LED cause interrupts in the Arduino code which are used to synchronize the polarizer. Long pulses on the LED cause the Arduino to enter calibration mode. The time interval between syncrhonization pulses is continuously measured and divided into three equal parts. On receiving a synchronization pulse the voltage is set to 0V for one part, to the 45 degree voltage for one part and finally to 5V for one part. Voltage for the polarizer is supplied from an Arduino PWM output pin. To get a reasonably stable output the PWM frequency was increased to 32 kHz and smoothed with a second order RC filter. The liquid crystal display will be damaged by a constant DC voltage so a CMOS switch is used to alternate the polarity. A 2 kHz square wave generated from a free running Arduino timer is used to drive the switching.

An iPhone app written in Swift is responsible for the user interface and image processing.

Explore the schematic in the picture below, while the full source code for the Arduino and iPhone can be downloaded from here.

Primary image

The idea in short:
I will send a robot around planet earth. The robot will be sent to you free of charge. Let it run in your area for 24h and show all earthlings your projects or a piece of your country. Send the rover to the next destination after your mission is over (postal charges will be refunded).
The robot can be controlled through a web interface while transmitting a live video stream. All young scientist and of course all discoverers that are young at heart get free access to the robots, there is even no registration needed.

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The purpose is clear. You don’t want your kids to steal your food from the cupboard, or from the fridge, or someone to open your locker. Or maybe you want to take pictures of your pet stealing food. Or maybe you are Dwight Schrute and you want to finally unmask […]

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The post You Can’t Touch This! Arduino Yún Alarm System appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

Halloween time is a great moment to explore nice interactive projects and get inspired for installations for other selfie occasions. To spice up the office Donnie Plumly, a creative technologist, decided to make and share with us a molded zombie arm that takes pictures and post them to Twitter.

He used a silicone arm (molded on his own hand ), a custom steel mount to clip to an office partition, and a vibration sensor hooked up to an Arduino Uno. Once the arm is slapped a photo will be taken using an IR Led and passed to the Eye-Fi card in the camera.

The photo is then saved into a Dropbox folder and, using If This Then That (IFTTT), posted to Twitter on the account @ZombieSelfie.

Donnie created also a very useful tutorial  on Instructable to make it yourself!

Make an automatic camera rig for shooting high-resolution panoramas with a point-and-shoot camera.

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The post Build an Automatic Photo Rig for Perfect Panoramas appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

In this project, you'll learn how to use an Arduino microcontroller and a stepper motor to precisely control the panning of a camera during a time lapse.

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The post Built a Motion Control Rig for Time-Lapse Photography appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

If you had a spare Game Boy Camera and the printer to match, what would you do with them? If you're media artist Dmitry Morozov, you'd make a one-of-a-kind firearm. His GBG-8 gun uses Nintendo's photographic peripherals and an Arduino board to shoot photos (almost literally) and print them on the spot -- effectively, it's a low-resolution Polaroid cam with a trigger. We can't imagine that this would go down well with security officials, but it could be a blast if you want to capture 8-bit memories with more flair than the original Game Boy gear allows. Let's just hope that Morozov offers some instructions so that his picture pistol is easy to reproduce at home.

Filed under: Misc, Gaming, Peripherals, Nintendo

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Via: Geek

Source: Vtol

[Jordan] managed to cobble together his own version of a low resolution digital camera using just a few components. The image generated is pretty low resolution and is only in grey scale, but it’s pretty impressive what can be done with some basic hardware.

The heart of the camera is the image sensor. Most consumer digital cameras have tons of tiny receptors all jammed into the sensor. This allows for a larger resolution image, capturing more detail in a smaller space. Unfortunately this also usually means a higher price tag. [Jordan’s] sensor includes just a single pixel. The sensor is really just an infrared photodiode inside of a tube. The diode is connected to an analog input pin on an Arduino. The sensor can be pointed at an object, and the Arduino can sense the brightness of that one point.

In order to compile an actual image, [Jordan] needs to obtain readings of multiple points. Most cameras do this using the large array of pixels. Since [Jordan’s] camera only has a single pixel, he has to move it around and take each reading one at a time. To accomplish this, the Arduino is hooked up to two servo motors. This allows the sensor to be aimed horizontally and vertically. The Arduino slowly scans the sensor in a grid, taking readings along the way. A Processing application then takes each reading and compiles the final image.

Since this camera compiles an image so slowly, it sometimes has a problem with varying brightness. [Jordan] noticed this issue when clouds would pass over while he was taking an image. To fix this problem, he added an ambient light sensor. The Arduino can detect the amount of overall ambient light and then adjust each reading to compensate. He says it’s not perfect but the results are still an improvement. Maybe next time he can try it in color.

[AlxDroidDev] built himself a nice remote control box for CHDK-enabled cameras. If you haven’t heard of CHDK, it’s a pretty cool software modification for some Canon cameras. CHDK adds many new features to inexpensive cameras. In this case, [AlxDroidDev] is using a feature that allows the camera shutter to be activated via USB. CHDK can be run from the SD card, so no permanent modifications need to be made to the camera.

[AlxDroidDev’s] device runs off of an ATMega328p with Arduino. It operates from a 9V battery. The circuit contains an infrared receiver and also a Bluetooth module. This allows [AlxDroidDev] to control his camera using either method. The device interfaces to the camera using a standard USB connector and cable. It contains three LEDs, red, green, and blue. Each one indicates the status of a different function.

The Arduino uses Ken Shirrif’s IR Remote library to handle the infrared remote control functions. SoftwareSerial is used to connect to the Bluetooth module. The Arduino code has built-in functionality for both Canon and Nikon infrared remote controls. To control the camera via Bluetooth, [AlxDroidDev] built a custom Android application. The app can not only control the camera’s shutter, but it can also control the level of zoom.

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