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How I Designed and Built a Custom Picture Frame for Polaroid Photos

Introduction As a lover of Polaroid photography, I’ve always wanted a simple, stylish way to display my favorite shots. However, I quickly realized that finding a frame specifically designed for a single Polaroid photo was nearly impossible. That’s what led me to design and build my own. This post will take you through my journey, from the design process to overcoming challenges and provide a step-by-step DIY guide so that as long as you have a laser cutter handy, you can build your own! The final version: looking rather professional but getting there was a journey The Inspiration & Initial Design I love the nostalgic charm of Polaroid photos, but I wanted a way to showcase them individually rather than in albums or on string clips. Traditional photo frames didn’t fit Polaroids well, often leaving too much space or cropping the unique white border. This motivated me to design a frame that perfectly fits a single Polaroid, allowing it to be displayed cleanly while maintaining its ae...
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Simple outline for multi-sprite characters in Unity 2D using Shader Graph

For the last 6 months I've been working on a new (untitled) 2D game project in Unity both as a way to learn C# and also to play around with some game concepts I've been thinking about for quite a while. Since I'm not much of an artist or a graphic designer I purchased a set of rather nice looking character sprites from  https://tokegameart.net/  that also came with animations and ready to use Unity packages. Since my game has multiple characters on screen at one and each one can be given orders I needed a way to show which one was selected or active. One common way to handle this which felt like a good fit for me is to show an outline around the selected character. Luckily there's a lot of examples and guides explaining how to do this in Unity (and I based this one on a great article by Daniel Ilett). There was one snag though, my characters consist of multiple sprites (one for reach part of the body) that are drawn and animated separately. This meant that it w...

Polaroid SX-70 + PolaSkinz

It's no secret that I love Polaroid cameras, and one of my absolute favourites is the SX-70. I've collected a few different models but one thing they all have in common is that the original faux leather cover has seen better days. Luckily there are a few companies that makes replacement leather covers, with WickedSkinz being the most accessible to me since their selection of covers are available on eBay (with fairly reasonable shipping fees for the UK). After receiving my brand new PolaSkinz cover I set out on the task of preparing the camera for it. This turned out to me messier than I had expected as both the glue and "leather" of the original cover had degraded (and partially dissolved) much over the last 40 years or so. After a lot of scraping, prying and finally some acetone to remove the last of the glue, it was finally stripped of its old cover. Then came the part I was most nervous about, applying the new cover. The process itself is ...

Introducing Chateau - A Open Source Chat Framework

After about 4 months of hard work I'm super excited to announce that the new open source project I've been working on is finally live. In short, it's a open source Chat framework for Android which lets you integrate Chat functionality into your app (fairly) easily. In the future I'm planning to post some articles here about the architecture and tools we've been using but for now please check out this post on the Badoo tech . Oh, and the project itself of course .

Converting a Type 80 Polaroid Land Camera to take Type 100 Film

Inspired by some great how-to's on how to convert Polaroid cameras using type 80 film to the wider type 100 film format (by Stratski and Nano_Burger ), I recently purchased a Polaroid Super Swinger Colour Camera. You might ask why I would buy this camera instead of just getting one that already takes type 100 film and to be honest, my answer is mostly: Because I can! Besides the fun prospect of bringing an obsolete piece of technology back to life there was also the idea of trying improve on previous attempts. This guide will show you how to convert any (as far as I know) type 80 camera to use type 100 film, without any modifications to the film packs themselves. This means that it will be much more convenient to load a new cartridge when you are out in the field (with no preparation needed). What you need Type 80 camera (I used a Super Colour Swinger) Side cutting pliers Type 80 film (Fujifilm FP-100C) Method Since type 100 film is wider than type 80 film, this w...

Nucleo STM32F446RE and OV7670

After many hours of trial and failure I finally managed to get my OV7670 camera module to work properly with the Nucleo STM32F446RE board. I will try to put together a longer article about some of the issues I encountered and how I solved them but for now the source code is available on GitHub .

Getting started with OpenSTM32 on OSX

For some time now I have been doing projects (or should I rather say "been playing around") with AVR microcontrollers. Both in the form of different types of Arduinos but also in stand-alone projects (including the USB KVM and a battery powered ATTINY85 board, which I still haven't written a post about). For the most part I really like these microcontrollers, they are versatile, low powered and the development tools available are excellent (and importantly, available on all major platforms). However, In one of my latest projects I encountered a situation where AVRs just might not be enough. What I wanted to do was to capture images from a digital camera module (OV7670) and process them to determine movement speed and direction. While it might in theory be possible to do so on an ATMEGA microcontroller or similar, the small amount of memory available would make such an operation tricky at best. At that point I started looking for a more powerful microcontroller, and o...