Category Archives: video hacks

Handheld Gimbal with Off-The-Shelf Parts

Posted on August 10, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

For anything involving video capture while moving, most videographers, cinematographers, and camera operators turn to a gimbal. In theory it is a simple machine, needing only three sets of bearings to allow the camera to maintain a constant position despite a shifting, moving platform. In practice it’s much more complicated, and gimbals can easily run into the thousands of dollars. While it’s possible to build one to reduce the extravagant cost, few use 100% off-the-shelf parts like [Matt]’s handheld gimbal.

[Matt]’s build was far more involved than bolting some brackets and bearings together, though. Most gimbals for filming are powered, …read more

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Posted in camera, gimbal, handheld, off the shelf, video, video hacks | Leave a comment

Movie Encoded in DNA is the First Step Toward Datalogging with Living Cells

Posted on July 13, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

While DNA is a reasonably good storage medium, it’s not particularly fast, cheap, or convenient to read and write to.

What if living cells could simplify that by recording useful data into their own DNA for later analysis? At Harvard Medical School, scientists are working towards this goal by using CRISPR to encode and retrieve a short video in bacterial cells.

CRISPR is part of the immune system of many bacteria, and works by storing sequences of viral DNA in a specific location to identify and eliminate viral infections. As a tool for genetic engineering, it’s cheaper and has fewer …read more

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Posted in biohacking, CRISPR, lifehacks, Medical hacks, video hacks | Leave a comment

VR and Back Again: An XRobots Tale

Posted on May 14, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Our friend [James Bruton] from XRobots has engaged in another bit of mixed-reality magic by showing how one can seamlessly step from the virtual world into the real world, and back again. Begone, green screens and cumbersome lighting!

Now, most of what you’re seeing is really happening in post-production — for now — but the test footage is the precursor for a more integrated system down the road. As it works now, a GoPro is attached to the front of a HTC Vive headset, allowing [Bruton] to record in both realities at the same time. In the VR test area …read more

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Posted in GoPro, green, htc, Mixed, reality, screen, video hacks, Virtual Reality, Vive | Leave a comment

Dartboard Watches Your Throw; Catches Perfect Bullseyes

Posted on March 22, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Some people really put a lot of effort into rigging the system. Why spend years practicing a skill and honing your technique to hit a perfect bullseye in darts when you can spend the time building an incredibly complicated auto-bullseye dartboard that’ll do it for you?

In fairness, what [Mark Rober] started three years ago seemed like a pretty simple task. He wanted to build a rig to move the dartboard’s bullseye to meet the predicted impact of any throw. Seems simple, but it turns out to be rather difficult, especially when you choose to roll your own motion capture …read more

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Posted in dartboard, darts, gantry, ir camera, misc hacks, motion capture, retroreflector, Vicon, video hacks | Leave a comment

Light Replaces Electrons for Giant Vector-Graphics Asteroids Game

Posted on March 9, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

For all its simplicity, the arcade classic Asteroids was engaging in the extreme, with the ping of the laser, the rumble of the rocket, the crash of crumbling space rocks, and that crazy warble when the damn flying saucers made an appearance. Atari estimates that the game has earned operators in excess of $500 million since it was released in 1979. That’s two billion quarters, and we’ll guess a fair percentage of those coins came from the pockets of Hackaday’s readers and staff alike.

One iconic part of Asteroids was the vector display. Each item on the field was drawn …read more

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Posted in arcade game, Asteroids, classic hacks, galvanometer, laser, vector display, vector graphics, video hacks | Leave a comment

Arduino Video isn’t Quite 4K

Posted on January 24, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Video resolution is always on the rise. The days of 640×480 video have given way to 720, 1080, and even 4K resolutions. There’s no end in sight. However, you need a lot of horsepower to process that many pixels. What if you have a small robot powered by a microcontroller (perhaps an Arduino) and you want it to have vision? You can’t realistically process HD video, or even low-grade video with a small processor. CORTEX systems has an open source solution: a 7 pixel camera with an I2C interface.

The files for SNAIL Vision include a bill of materials and …read more

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Posted in arduino, Arduino Hacks, camera, computer vision, snail vision, video hacks, vishay, vision | Leave a comment

Bitbanging VGA Fits In under 1 kB

Posted on December 8, 2016 by Fernando Gomes

Don’t throw those old VGA monitors away, turn them into works of art with [danjovic] and VGA Blinking Lights. This circuit uses a PIC16F688 to generate VGA video. Not just a random spray of monochrome dots either. VGA Blinking Lights puts up an ever-changing display of 48 colored squares.

Originally created for the square inch contest, VGA Blinking Lights could hide behind a quarter. [Danjovic] dusted his project off and entered it in The 1 kB Challenge. The code is written in PIC assembly. The final hex used to generate the squares clocks in at 471 words. Since the PIC …read more

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Posted in pic, vga, video, video hacks | Leave a comment

Script Your Way Out Of Video Editing Drudgery

Posted on November 26, 2016 by Fernando Gomes

[Victor Frost] has a deep voice and a fancy top of the line camera. While one would assume this to be a more than generous situation for life to put a person in; it’s got its own set of problems. Mainly that his fantastic fancy camera uses the most modern version of the popular h.264 encoding scheme, h.265. Gasp!

While that too seems like a pro, unfortunately h.265 doesn’t play as nice with his editing software. The solution seems easy, just transcode it and get on your way. However, when you start talking about transcoding 4K video from a top-of-the …read more

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Posted in cmd, computer, Computer Hacks, encoding, h.265, networking, shell scripting, transcoding, video hacks, windows | Leave a comment

3D Printed GoPro Toy Car Mount

Posted on November 24, 2016 by Fernando Gomes

There’s been a spate of YouTube videos of people strapping GoPro cameras onto things recently. [Ruiz] at [Adafruit] is looking to contribute to this trend with this tutorial on 3D printing a GoPro Session toy car mount. The entire toy car mount is 3D printed, except for the axles, which are made of the unprinted filament with melted ends to hold the wheels in place.

The part of the mount that fits around the camera is printed in a flexible filament (think Ninjaflex), so it holds on tightly to the GoPro and can be used as a bumper as well. …read more

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Posted in digital cameras hacks, GoPro, video hacks | Leave a comment

Projection Mapping in Motion Amazes

Posted on October 30, 2016 by Fernando Gomes

Projection mapping is pretty magical; done well, it’s absolutely miraculous when the facade of a building starts popping out abstract geometric objects, or crumbles in front of our very eyes. “Dynamic projection mapping onto deforming non-rigid surface” takes it to the next level. (Watch the video below.)

A group in the Ishikawa Watanabe lab at the University of Tokyo has a technique where they cover the target with a number of dots in an ink that is only visible in the infra-red. A high-speed (1000 FPS!) camera and some very fast image processing then work out not only how the …read more

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Posted in augmented reality, demo, math, projection mapping, research, tokyo, university, video hacks | Leave a comment