Making a 130 Year Old Instant Camera

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The Camera itself is a work of art

The camera above was a very impressive gadget back in the 1890s. I got it at a camera fair in Boston Spa. It’s a quarter plate camera which takes pictures on glass slides. These are mounted inside a film holder which clips onto the back of the camera. When it was time to take a picture you’d slide back a “dark slide” on the film holder which covers the film surface and fire the shutter. Then you’d slide the dark slide back over the film and try to remember not to expose it again. The film holder has a dark slide on each side, so each holder is good for two shots.

Back home in the dark you’d take the glass slide out of the camera, develop it to make a negative and then create contact prints by exposing photographic paper through the negative. Then you’d post the prints to your friends and head off the chemists to buy some more glass slides, chemicals and paper to repeat the process. Instagram in the time of Queen Victoria.

You can’t get the glass slides any more. But you can get Instax Wide instant film. It turns out that the instant film is around 2 mm deeper than the glass plates and won’t fit in the holders I got with the camera, which is rather annoying. So I thought I’d make my own film holders which are large enough to allow me to use instant film with the camera.

This was the design I came up with. The dark slide (the black thing in the picture above) fits behind the blue outer frame. Then we have the Instax film (you can just see the grey edge of the film sheet) which fits inside top of half of the frame (the red bit). The purple bit at the bottom is the other half of the frame. That will have another outer frame bolted to it and hold a second dark slide. All the parts are bolted together. I have to use this rather complex design because 3D printers can’t really print the kind of overhangs that you’d need to print both sides at the same time.

Pen and Tie Fighter for scale

At the back right is the camera folded up in its little box. On the left at the front is an original wooden film holder. On the right is my 3D printed version. It turns out to be light tight enough to be used successfully. I wouldn’t leave it out in the sun, but as long as you keep it in the shade it works fine. I load it up with Instax film, pop it in the camera, slide open the dark slide, take the the picture, put the film back into an Instax film holder and then run it through an instant camera to process it. It sounds a bit complicated, but it is easy enough. If I make a few more of the holders I can load them all up and then go out and take a bunch of pictures.

On the left is the first ever picture I took with the camera and my film holder. The duck is a bit blurred, but the stuff further back is tack sharp. The picture on the right is not particularly interesting, but it is lovely and sharp with plenty of detail. There’s a light leak down the left because I pulled the dark slide all the way out and a bit of light got in. The finished version has a stop which prevents the dark slide from being pulled all the way out, so that shouldn’t happen again.

I’m going to take the camera to the next hardware meetup and try and take some portraits with it. The film holder designs will be available on GitHub for anyone who has a camera like this and fancies using it as an instant camera.

Hello Rodret

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Ikea were selling off remote control devices for two pounds each when we went there recently. I bought four. Last of the big spenders.

The devices use the old Zigbee connection rather than the newer technology. I’ve paired one with my TRADFRI Ikea gateway and I can control the brightness of a light with it, which is a start. There are a few projects online involving Home Assistant which I’m going to have a play with.

Lego Smart Brick Fun

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At the beginning of March Lego launched their new Smart Brick technology. The idea is to make Lego models you can interact with. It’s all based around the “Smart Brick”. This is a slightly taller version of the standard “2x8” Lego brick that contains a tiny microcontroller connected to a battery, a microphone, a speaker, an accelerometer, light sensors and a bunch of lights. The brick also contains a bunch of coils which point in different directions. The coils are used to take power from a wireless charger, talk to external RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) devices and also to detect the position and orientation of smart bricks nearby. It’s clever stuff and it all just works.

I initially pre-ordered a couple of sets that contained Smart Bricks. Then I changed my mind and bought a camera instead. Then I got to take a look at the bricks up close and I changed my mind again and bought some. I’d seen reviews that didn’t like the sounds that the bricks made and the way you interacted with them. But I reckon that they are just fine.

At the moment the only sets you can buy are Star Wars themed so I got an X Wing and a Tie Fighter. That got me Luke, Darth and Princess Leia “smart minifigures”. These contain RFID chips which can trigger a Smart Brick to do things. All the behaviours are character appropriate, although you don’t get any voice clips as such. Instead you get a burbling sound a bit like the way that Animal Crossing characters talk. The bricks are controlled by waving different coloured items close to them. Red seems to make lasers fire, green repairs and blue refuels. And if you shake the bricks or move them around, and they’ve been placed in one of the ships, you will get appropriate sounds. It’s a bit restricting to only have two smart bricks; you have to move them between models. The interactions are a bit limited, but they are there and show a lot of potential.

The models themselves are sturdy and fun to make. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next with the bricks. They can talk Bluetooth to your phone, although at the moment this connection doesn’t do much. In fact, there is a lot of unrealised potential at the moment, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be used in the future. At some point you will be able to upgrade the software in the brick and these features will become available. I’m looking forward to that.

Pro Camera Tip

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Here’s a Pro Camera tip which makes you look a bit less like an amateur. At least, I hope it works for me. When you’ve finished taking some pictures, put all the settings on your camera back to “normal” values. This means that next time you use the camera you won’t end up taking a whole bunch of pictures that are massively underexposed because last time you used the camera you turned down exposure compensation down a bunch. Don’t ask me how I know this..

Film Camera Zen

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I bought a few books at the Photography Show yesterday. Well, they were 20% off. Mathematically that’s like getting the fifth one free.

Anyhoo, one of the books was Film Camera Zen. It’s a bunch of pictures of really nice cameras along with nice descriptions of why the cameras are so nice. It’s giving me lots of ideas for new things to take a look at - as if I need help.

Frozen Connected Little Boxes

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My MicroPython Connected Little Boxes (CLB) implementation is going from strength to strength. I’ve got a bunch of hardware managers all working together and I’ve made quite a few devices using the platform. And today I’ve managed to build my own version of MicroPython, incorporating the CLB code. This is wonderful for quite a few reasons. It makes it easier to install the library, since you just have to flash the MicroPython image and you get the CLB code for free. It makes more memory available for code, since the CLB programs run from flash memory. It also means that things will get going faster as the CLB functions don’t need to be compiled before execution.

The process of building your own MicroPython is a lot easier than I thought it would be, although you need a Linux machine to do it. I’m using Windows WSL on my PC, but I’m going to have a got at building everything on a Raspberry Pi. I’m going to make a complete howto for this. I’m also going to add a system to integrate settings files into the stored code so that it is easy to select from a repertoire of built-in device types.

Live Science Comedy from Hull Colliderfest

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We went to see some live comedy tonight. It was awesome. We were at the Comedy Lounge in Hull which we’d not been to before. It’s a great venue. You get your own table, and your own little lamp. When you fancy a drink you light the lamp, a smiling person appears to take your order, and then the drinks appear. Wonderful. And then some folks stand up at the front and make you laugh a lot. Good times.

There were four comics on the bill. The whole thing was held together by Sam Gregson, AKA “The Bad Boy of Science”. He did a splendid job of keeping things going and put in a very good set of his own. He says he’s a particle physicist, but I thought he looked a lot bigger than that.

Katie Steckles started the evening with a bit of mathematical trickery involving barcodes which was an impressive bit of “sleight of numbers” and led into a set describing how sums underpin pretty much everything we do, including making sure that when you scan a tin of peas at the till, you get the bill for a can of peas. Katie also did a masterful deconstruction of your driving licence number (yes really) and revealed how one idea of a check digit (let’s add extra data we can use to detect when someone types it wrong) can collide with another (let’s add extra data so we can convince ourselves that nobody can ever make a fake version of this data). Great stuff.

Chella Quint was billed as talking about “Woman’s Health” which worried me a bit at the start, what with me being famously squeamish and also a man. But it was really good, a meditation on how a good way to get rich is to create a problem and then sell the solution to it. And how this can end up de-normalising what should be perfectly natural aspects of life. You might think that mass misinformation started with the internet, but Chella showed a bunch of adverts from over years showing that peddling anxiety and unhappiness about natural bodily functions (and - of course the products that claim to fix it) has been going on for years. It was great to see what she is doing about it. You can find out more here.

Finally we had Farrah Sharp, who was examining the vicissitudes (it’s a word - look it up) of modern life through the lens of someone used to analysing and presenting data. As someone who gives my actions way more analysis than they actually need I could see where she was coming from, although I’ve never felt the need to put any of my thoughts and feelings into a spreadsheet just yet. Farrah’s session was a hoot though, I’ve never seen bar-graphs and Ven diagrams get as many laughs as the ones she put up on the screen.

It was a great night. Thanks to Hull Colliderfest for setting it up, the performers for being awesome and the folks at the comedy lounge for making us so welcome.

Monitor Success

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It still works!

For many years there has been a legend in the family about a Commodore monitor hidden somewhere in our loft. It’s a 1084p model that was sold for use with the Commodore Amiga, but I kept mine around for the Sony PlayStation and beyond. Eventually it found its way to “the place where electrical things go to die” and we forgot where it was.

Until now. After an intensive search we managed to track it down and carry it carefully downstairs. It seems to have survived its time between the joists quite well. We had a look at the circuit board and all the capacitors looked in good shape so we pushed our luck and powered it up. It worked, which was nice. Along with the monitor we also found this, which I bought in a fit of madness a long time ago and then promptly forgot about:

Imagine if you had spent all year waiting for a Nintendo 64 and then found this under the Cristmas tree…

We were searching for something that could output composite video and this, despite its many other faults, will do that. It works fine too. Some of the 84 games have Mario in the title. One of them works with the light gun. All of them have an eight-bit flavour you might recall from the very earliest days of home computing. And there really are 84. If you really want a console like this to give to someone you don’t like much, search for “Retro Argo Ultra 8 Bit Video Game Console” and you might get lucky. Or not.

Anyhoo, the monitor is headed off for a happy retirement running the occasional retro game where a cathode ray tube (CRT) display gives the proper authentic experience.

Spitfire in Hull

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I’m not sure if it is a real one, but it looks pretty real to me

They had a Spitfire outside Hull Minster when we went up town today. It’s a lovely looking plane. Essentially the pilot sits in behind an enormous engine which is connected to a great big fan right at the front and there whole thing flies along several thousand feet up at several hundred miles an hour under fire from the enemy. No wonder it’s called “the right stuff”. They also had a rather nice MG car from the same era.

I don’t think this car has satnav that keeps whining about needing a map update.

I love the way they have a handle on the dashboard for the passenger to cling onto

..and a very british hamper on the back

Instax Film Holders

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I’m just wondering if any of my readers have a quarter plate camera from around 120 years ago and fancy using it to take Instax Large photographs but have discovered that the quarter plate film holders are just a tad too large for the prints.

If you are in this position (which I agree is perhaps unlikely) I might have some good news for you. Once I’ve completed the design…