Nearly all hobbies require gear, however pictures is among the many most costly. Even novice photographers will spend hundreds on digicam our bodies, lenses, and lighting. And that gear tends to be stunning, so throwing it away as soon as it turns into out of date could be a travesty. Petri Damstén, a photographer from Finland, had an outdated flash unit gathering mud. To present it new life, he transformed that flash unit right into a digital clock that’s excellent for adorning a pictures studio.
This seems like a typical flash unit, so it’s at house amongst different outdated digicam gear on a shelf. However as an alternative of simply trying fairly and evoking a way of nostalgia, it performs a perform: displaying the time. The place the flash unit’s diffuser panel was, there’s now a small TFT LCD display screen that exhibits the present time. Under the time, there are ornamental dial markings like the sort you’d see on a digicam lens. Under these, there are a number of further items of data: the present temperature in Celsius, the date, and a dot indicating if the temperature if plus or minus (purple is optimistic, blue is adverse).
The aesthetics are excellent, as they very carefully mimic the fashion of digicam settings screens. When positioned atop a pleasant classic Leica, the flash unit’s show seems like one thing created by a German design home.
To make this work, Damstén pulled the unique digital parts out of the flash unit’s enclosure and changed them with a Raspberry Pi Pico W improvement board and a 1.8” ST7735-based TFT LCD display screen. Damstén selected the Pico W for its built-in WiFi adapter, which lets it keep up to date with NTP (Community Time Protocol) and pull climate data from the web. He programmed that performance utilizing Adafruit’s CircuitPython. Energy comes from a USB cable hidden behind the digicam.
Photographers are likely to care an excellent deal about design and visuals, so this could attraction to anybody with a group of outdated digicam gear.
