As someone who's been doing mechanical product engineering for 30+ years, doing this as a first project is way more than jumping off the deep end. Impressive.
BTW, if you want to design some models for 3D printing but the only thing you know to do is to code, you can use OpenSCAD & program the obejcrs into existence:
Hey, this is super interesting! Thanks for sharing.
I have been playing with using the Python console/scripts/macros in FreeCAD to create 3D models. I found this to be very friendly for my programmer mindset. I have learned a bit of onshape, tinkercad, blender and freecad, but I find it extremely tedious and full of unknowns that I struggle to make sense of and resolve (e.g. contraints in freecad, sometimes I just don't know how to add the missing constraints, or just adding text to a curved face in literally all programs, it's never as easy as click the face add text, there are always gotcha's).
I wonder how does openscad compare to FreeCADs python, if you know. I just found https://pythonscad.org/ which looks interesting, but then, the BOSL2 library looks super interesting and important for a good user experience, so I do not know if the PythonSCAD could somehow just import it and use it.
I guess there's homework for me to do here, but if anyone has the experience to get a hint of "what is the best/easiest python-based programming way of doing 3D modeling", I'd be forever thankful for sharing their thoughts.
LLMs are really good at writing Python, so iterating over a model in code I found is really quick, and I really enjoy the process. Meanwhile clicking so many times in so many menus makes me desist on designing anything more-or-less complex.
Another, arguably even more powerful, alternative is Rhino + Grasshopper. Grasshopper is often used for generative designs, but can include arbitrary Python nodes and can even be used for "parametrically" designed functional parts.
Grasshopper can also output gcode directly [1], enabling pretty wild things like [2].
Most of the modern ones do - anything from the IQ1-IQ4 has a good preview screen, for live view specifically you need a CMOS sensor based one like the IQ3 100 or the IQ4 150. The CCD ones technically do live view but it's really not good. So this only works for backs that are fairly expensive still...
Close to West Seattle! I'm in the North Seattle area and walk around near the water there a lot.
I understand the urge to say this to potential blog readers. But you're not actually selling us anything. Who cares if you're qualified or not? You built it and you're telling us what you learned.
The Panasonic GX series of cameras was very similar to what we see here, and prices for them remain elevated years past their discontinuation. I'm a little surprised they haven't introduced a new model in that lineup.
The Fuji X-E5 also seems similar to this, though obviously with a different lens mount.
GM-5 is probably the greatest pocket-size mirrorless, and maybe the last. The GX-85 is also great, but it does have a larger grip and more of a shoulder at the top.
The G-100D is also quite small, but the faux pentaprism at the top makes it just a bit too big to justify being MFT.
I have a GM1, it's truly a standout camera. GM5 makes it even better. It's quite funny nobody wants to attempt similar sizes, even when the market has voted for pocketable cameras.
Especially OM - with all their troubles, if it were me I'd have pivoted the company to sizes that do justice to the mount's inherent size advantage. They have a rich legacy of amazing small cameras (Trip, Pen, XA series, and the overrated mju ii) - yet it's fuji selling an order of magnitude more x-halfs than anything OM is producing.
If they just remade it with modern AF software, I'd probably carry mine around most every I went. Not to mention what they could do by updating hardware.
I have to say I'm a bit unimpressed with the efforts of the MFT consumer system camera manufacturers. Panasonic creates excellent cameras, they're so big it lessens the appeal of the smaller mount. OM makes cameras of the right size, but it's releasing new models really really slowly, with mediocre sensors. The OM-5 mark II is a lame rehash. Only the OM-3 is somewhat exciting, but it sacrifices too much in terms of ergonomics to achieve an aesthetic I don't care about.
On the other hand there's no other class of camera that really works on vacation/travel and is meaningfully better than a smartphone. Oh, well.
I wonder if there's a marketing reason for not shrinking the lenses. A big lens screams "better" more than a smaller lens at a casual glance for the uninitiated user.
It's an engineering reason really, the entire reason why MFTs were so popular when they came out was because people were tired of lugging around their Full-Frame camera's zoom lens, and were sick of missing moments when using a prime lens.
The marketing gimmick for awhile was ultra-zooms which allow for smaller lenses via fixing distortion using DSP, but this degrades the image quality, and so never became a solution for RAW shooters.
I think it's directly related to sensor size and given the shape of lenses (cylinders) that means bigger sensors should probably have a non linear relationship to lens size.Though it is probably not quite that simple. In any case, bigger lenses allow for smaller f stops with a given focal length, and people really do love bokeh...
I doubt it. I don’t think anyone is spending $2k on Canon L-series (red ring) lenses based on the size. On the high end, photographers are pretty discerning about equipment’s capabilities. If they made my Canon EF 35mm f1.4L USM II half the size and weight I’d be thrilled.
The volume for physical cameras is low and shrinking. The companies can't justify putting nearly the same investment as smartphone companies selling 100x the units can.
The volume for cameras like this was always low. Even in the days before you had a camera on your smartphone, people were buying Polaroids, compact cameras with a small lens built in, or disposable cameras. They weren't buying something more complicated unless they were hobbyist photographers.
Not hobby. Taking photo is always key to life for many.
Before phone for major event like graduation, wedding and baby birth people do buy one camera with one lens for the occasion and keep it as a family heirloom like. And even students gala and performances. Whilst a lot of point and shot, slr and later dslr are common. The key it is not a hobby to them but a life even to record.
Unlike people like us canon and nikon found it hard to sell the second lens or even second body.
Those compact cameras with a built in lens still funded the R&D for the expensive cameras. They can all run the same OS and software, etc. Smartphones have continuously chipped away at the bottom tier of cameras to the point where even hobbyist photographers use smartphones. And only the absolute top tier of very expensive cameras still exist.
The OM-3 is fine ergonomically, for me at least. The thumb pad on the back is very comfortable and balances the body very well. I held off buying one for a while because of ergonomic concerns but in practice it’s been great.
I'm super happy with my OM10 mark3 and z9. the first is super fun to use and gives a really satisfying shitter kachunk when you shoot and the z9 though a chonker makes adjusting stuff easy having a billion buttons
>On the other hand there's no other class of camera that really works on vacation/travel and is meaningfully better than a smartphone.
My a6500 is serving me well, though I guess it depends what you mean by "meaningfully better than a smartphone". I do end up with a lot more photos that I like when I go on vacation with a camera than with just a smartphone
Edit: also applies to commuting, but I'm always a bit uneasy about having my camera with me when comutting.
Olympus is one of the few camera (I literally have hundreds as this is my side hobby) I love to use. Until every time I want to change anything. As a guy who can do 8x10, gfx, 907x, z9 etc I still find the menu system totally confusing.
I don't know, man. They're very customizable, and some models have memory banks. I never need to go in the menus of my pen-f. And The OM-1 has a much improved menu system, with a customizable "my menu" page, which opens directly, on which you can stick your most used menu items (but, sadly, it's not included in the saved memory banks).
Furthermore, I find the physical buttons on the om1 are so customizable and can do so many things, that I never go in the menu, either. I haven't tried new models from the other makers, but the olympus models I have are much nicer to use than my old canon 40d and nikon d80.
I had to think about this a while since my Olympus is my go to camera just because I love using it but I agree some of the menus are mildly confusing....though leaps ahead of sony
I'm very happy with my thoroughly behind-the-curve E-M10, and I'm secretly glad the newer ones aren't all that great because I don't have to spend money on upgrading.
> Only the OM-3 is somewhat exciting, but it sacrifices too much in terms of ergonomics to achieve an aesthetic I don't care about.
I was very disappointed with the om3. I love the aesthetic, but I feel it's half-assed. The faux-pentaprism bump is the specific point I hate. If it had the body of a pen-f, I would have been all over it. As it is, it's just a prettier om-1 with worse ergonomics.
I should note that I already have a pen-f, and don't have any issue with its ergonomics (I used it yesterday on -5ºC with big gloves, it was fine). Since I don't lug around foot-long lenses, the lack of grip isn't a problem.
This is amazing. It's such a shame that Olympus and Panasonic have largely abandoned the small camera market within the M43 system. I really wish another manufacturer would step up and build something similar to the GX85, which is still one of my favorite walkaround cameras.
FWIW, Olympus spun-off/sold their consumer camera division. It's now operating as OM System (1) and has released a few new cameras over the past few years. As the article mentioned, the latest is the OM-3, which is sort of similar form factor, but not exactly compact. They also have the smaller Pen EP-7, but it's not available in the US (though they're readily available on Ebay or via KEH etc). I bought an EP-7 for an earlier Xmas gift to myself, but haven't had much change to use it (previously had an EP-5 and E-M5ii).
Meh, I love my Olympus cameras, but I wouldn't call the latest models exactly small. The OM1 is pretty huge, even though it's smaller than the ridiculous Panasonic G9. I think it's close to the Sony a7 line and the canon r6, which are full-frame. Of course, if you're into long lenses, it wipes the floor with them, if the compromise works for you. On the wide end, the advantage isn't as clear-cut, though nobody else has anything comparable to the 8-25.
What I'm hoping to see is a new penf. When it came out, they somehow managed to cram into that small body almost everything the em1 had at the time. The om3 is pretty small, too, but for some reason they decided to keep the faux-pentaprism bump. It would have been great if it had the viewfinder to the side.
The Pen EP-7 is the same size as the older EP-5. With any of the Olympus prime lenses, it's about as small as you get (ignoring the Pentax Q, which was ridiculously tiny).
But 100% agree on the OM-1 and OM-3. They're smaller than many APS-C bodies, especially once you add a lens, but they're nowhere near pocketable, not even in a jacket pocket. And I feel like the OM-3 was a bit of a miss - it should have been a "rangefinder" form factor (no pentaprism hump) and a few mm smaller in each dimension. And marketed as a Pen-F. That said, the camera itself seems to be pretty darn good - basically a slightly smaller, vintage-vibe OM-1. Once used examples hit the market, I'll be tempted to buy one.
My parents both shoot Nikon DSLRs and I chuckle every time they break out their birding lenses (400mm NIKKOR of some sort). It's as big as my forearm and fills half a backpack. My Lumix 100-300 (yeah, not quite apple-to-apple) is minuscule in comparison. [I don't do enough wildlife to bother with a more expensive telephoto).
I just bought a GX9 5 years after selling my whole system cause I missed the form factor so much. M43 really is the best compromise between size and image quality imo, with the caveat that I'm not a professional. No other mount lets me casually EDC an 80-300 equivalent lens.
There's Esquisse (https://esquisse.camera/) trying to step up, but it's still in the very early stages.
This post, where someone from one field decides to do something they love but in another field, reminds me of the below:
At my kids' elementary school there is a yearly "Dad's Night" show where the dads get up and do skits, dance, sing and/or make funny videos.
You get to see dads who sell insurance or are lawyers do dance numbers that look professionally choreographed or make music videos that look like they could have been on MTV.
It's a reminder that "The Sort" pulls people very strongly into certain fields but there is always that question, from the movie Up In The Air and asked by George Clooney, "How much did they pay you to give up your dream?" [0]
Part of me is VERY excited to see AI/LLMs help facilitate this for the people who always thought "I have always wanted to write a piece of software but didn't know how and now I can!"
This is awesome! Great work. The "do first, ask questions later" mindset is inspiring as it's so easy (for me at least) to get stuck forever in a preparation / ideas phase.
I would also love to see some photos taken with it.
Unless something went terribly wrong, they'll look just like photos taken with a Panasonic G9 II. Samples from that camera are readily available online.
> the lens should be as centered as possible. I wanted to avoid that horrendous look of cameras with the lens as close to the left edge as possible (Sony a6000, I’m looking at you here).
The only thing really wrong about the Sony a6000 is the lack of weatherproofing. With even a 55-210 kit lens and maybe a good filter, you can still get amazing quality from far away - such as being able to pick apart finer architectural details of a monument that’s about 5-6mi away.
a6000 is APS-C, so 1.5x crop factor, 55-210 therefore is equivalent to 72.5-315 full frame. At 5-6 miles away that would mean each of your pixels (24mp sensor I think?) are something like, a 16-19cm square. I don't know if it's enough for architectural detail. I feel like it wouldn't, I have a cathedral I often take pictures of, at 1km it's okay, kinda fills the frame on the 55-210, at 3 miles (~5km) it's really small in the frame.
Practically and ergonomically I prefer a centered lens. Your hand has to reach less far to reach the focus ring and aperture control. Most slr cameras have buttons on both sides of the lens, so developing muscle memory is easier when those actions are split between each hand. Rotation of the camera is also much more natural. It also centers the lens' pov between your eyes, matching their parallax, which is really important for composing the photograph outside of the viewfinder.
> It also centers the lens' pov between your eyes, matching their parallax, which is really important for composing the photograph outside of the viewfinder.
The compact sonys have the viewfinder in the top-left corner, so having the mount to the side improves the paralax situation, although doesn't remove it.
I had my directions reversed, so the extra reach doesn't really apply, I suppose, but I think aligned to the right side (when looking into the lens) is even worse. I maybe see what you mean about your hand hitting the body, but i actually want that; my grip has me resting the body along much of my left hand and cradled in my palm. That is really important to stability for me, it gives me an extra stop to work with.
When I was shopping, I was comparing the Sony Alphas with the Fujifilm XT line.
And in reviews, complaints were made that the lens (and view finder) being centered in the XT means you squish your nose against the screen in the back.
But... I just liked the look and dials of the XT-5 so much more than the barebones boxy look of the α6700.
(Sony has meaningfully better autofocus too, I'll be sad, but I wanted the nice looking body...)
And yes my nose squishes against that back screen.
I just got the XT-5 too - not for the form but because the feature set is so good. However, I don't get this obsession on centred viewfinders - they could be anywhere on the camera body now they are digital; they may as well be on the left side where my nose isn't going to be smudging the screen.
A6000 and A6600 owner checking in : I love the boxy look! The viewfinder on the left makes lining up long shots kinda hard though. I have to zoom out to 50mm find my subject (birds) then zoom back to 400mm+, so I have been eyeing the more expensive models just to have it in the center. Idk if it would even help lol.
My only camera is a Sony a6000 and I bought it partially because I thought it looked great. If it causes some issue I wouldn't even know it because I've never tried something else.
Going from mostly centered lenses on dslr and m43 cameras to Sony with lens on mostly left side, I do prefer the offset lenses. Ergonomically and looks-wise both.
Very impressive build! It's amazing what one can do thanks to CNC and FLPCB manufacturing services readily available to any motivated hacker.
One tip for the author who noticed the camera being warm: measure its power consumption, and compare to an unmodified G9ii. Especially because you noticed it drains the battery relatively quickly(!) This is a glaring "connect the dots" situation to me. The root cause might be something very stupid. For example when you removed the microphone jack, the camera thought a microphone was connected, so it activated a microphone nenu. But given the extensive number of mods you made, it's possible you are making the firmware think some accessory is connected—could be anything: (light) flash, external screen, USB gadget, JTAG reader, SD card, etc. So it's taking a code path to initialize the device, but it fails because the device is not present, and it retries repeatedly, thus entering a retry loop that's causing excessive CPU usage... That wouldn't surprise me. You are running a G9ii that's unique therefore a rare software code path like this would not happen on a standard G9ii and would never have been fixed by the developers.
Edit: I see the author measured power here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lumix/comments/1oif3jp/how_much_doe... and to my eyes, these seem really high numbers. For example in video playback mode he measures 340mA, so 2.45W (battery is 7.2V nominal). The standard G9ii battery is 16Wh that means it would last only 6.5 hours playing back video. Compare this to a Pixel 9 phone: 18.3Wh battery and can playback video for 15 hours (I believe these are benchmark numbers reported playing back 4k H264 video, probably in a similar-ish format to the G9ii in terms of bitrate, etc). Plus the phone is at a disadvantage as it has a bigger, more power-hungry display. So it seems to me his G9ii consumes twice as much power as it should, if not more... If anything a pro camera should be more optimized than a general-purpose consumer device when playing video!
Amazing work, and so inspiring! The size difference compared to the G9ii made it all worth it!
Lately I've been converting a few old 5k iMac's to work as external displays, and I had a thought about making my own housing for the display instead of using the iMac chassis. This gives me some motivation to look into it further!
...it will come up with what I have used in the last few conversions.
Though I have seen Quinn Nelson (Snazzy Labs on YouTube) released a video recently that shows his process which is a bit more involved, but better. Apparently his method is better to remove risks of power surges from the controller board (I haven't experienced it yet...!), but his method also retains the speakers, and relocates the I/O inputs to be more accessible.
I’ve been thinking about putting an MFT mount on my RX100 to use it with more interesting lenses (I have it for the high frame rate capability) but concluded it to be way too much effort and risk.
And then along comes a person with enough determination to build an entire custom case! Truly impressive.
I saw footage someone captured when they modified their Canon 1D to use a PL mount. They then mounted a 17mm, iirc, that in a slow shutter could capture as many photons as my shitty 20mm EF mount could do in a 5s long exposure in bulb mode. The front piece of glass on that 17mm was ginormous. I really wish I could remember the guy's name to find a link. He mounted that camera to the front of a fishing boat down the canyon river pushed by the current navigating in the dark with night vision goggles. The resulting timelapse was glorious.
There was something specific to the body of the 1D that allowed for the proper flange depth of PL lenses that the other Canon bodies did not work for this mod.
Agreed, this is some proper nice tinkering writeup that we get far too rarely now.
Lovely project! I'm a software guy who in recent years does lots of CAD for hobby projects (mainly robotics) and orders custom machined parts (lots of sheet metal construction, occasionally milled parts) along with 3D printing.
I find parametric modelling very zen. Stacking operations is very Lego-like, like stringing up pure functions. Plus I can listen to podcasts while I model, but not while I write code - it engages the brain differently.
Now that LLMs are sapping some of the joy out of programming (I use the tools, they're productive, achieving goals and delivering user value is still satisfying, etc. - but the act of writing code is just more enjoyable than prompting, so it's a tad dispiriting that it's getting harder to jusitify) I also find that I get a lot of satisfaction from doing something with my hands. In some ways it's a safer space for technical creativity.
Paragraphica is a lensless, sensorless camera that, when you press the shutter, compiles a bunch of data with GPS, location, time of day etc, and feeds it to an image generator to create the image.
Yes! As an optical engineer, I heard endless complaints about how the camera doesn't "see" like our eyes do.
Even the 1990s cameras were far superior to a "static picture" from our eyes: color everywhere, instead of mostly in the fovea, no blind spot, etc.
What they lacked was: higher resolution wherever you chose to concentrate within the scene at one moment, jagged lines if they weren't perfectly aligned (your eyes correct near-lines to be LINES), and (in the 1990s) lower peak resolution.
(Weirdly, people used to argue that "digital would NEVER have better resolution than film, even though it was clearly trending upwards to and past that static goal...).
It's kind of a meme within the photography community though. People will spend many thousands of dollars on a camera that's supposedly "the best" (pick your fave reasons, ideally as obscure as possible) and then not actually shoot with it. Looking at yall, Leica fans.
There's a saying about how typical people use their audio system to listen to music, but audiophiles use music to listen to their audio system. An equivalent should be made for photography.
The camera they want is also the camera I want. I say this as someone who still regularly shoots with an Olympus Pen-F and also has a Fuji X100VI, and primarily shoots a Nikon Z8 but wishes there was a more compact entry into FF. I actually really like the m4/3/MFT format, especially for travel photography, but it's a struggle because the best lenses are Pana/Leica and the best bodies are OM/Oly, and neither has done much to really develop the technology in the last 10 years. MFT feels dead, but even as a dead format, nothing compares to the size/weight flexibility it gives you.
It's a nice build, but there is a baffling discordance between putting all this time and money into making a CNC body and ripping the ports off a $1900 camera's motherboard with pliers when the soldering iron didn't do the job rather than waiting until you could get a hot air rig, which could easily have destroyed the motherboard by peeling a trace or cracking layers. I guess at a certain point you just have too much money to behave rationally.
>>> …them myself with a manual tapping tool. Well, that didn’t go well, it was hard to keep the tool straight, the threads were loose, and broke few taps rendering the holes useless.
The haters will hate, but tap guides are great (e.g. https://biggatortools.com/v-tapguide-faqs, but even a block of hard wood with a clearance hole drilled in it works fine).
Unless you're tapping something super tough (306?), Amazon taps are fine for hand tapping. Go in straight, use a good lubricant.
I've got two of those tap guides, one for US and one for metric. They're great. Also for drilling since I don't have a drill press at home.
I've examined cheap taps under a microscope. Maybe they are of varying quality, but the ones I got had burrs all along the cutting edges. A tap that I borrowed from a machine shop was flawless in comparison. So maybe the middle ground is caveat emptor.
Another trick for tapping is to use something pointy in the drill chuck to center the tap after drilling, assuming you've clamped down your workpiece in a drill press or mill. This works for really big taps when you don't have a guide for them. Likewise the tailstock of a lathe can be used for this purpose.
I do not know if the author/creator is a user here on HN. But if you are, then absolutely amazing work. I love everything about it! You really did create a much more aesthetically pleasing camera and must have learned a ton along the way. I applaud your courage and/or naïveté to even undertake a project like this for no other reason than because you want it to exist.
This kind of thing works better with GPL. General use falls under GPL. If that doesn’t suit your commercial use, contact the copyright holder for another license.
As it stands, I can use the MIT licensed project anyway I like, including handing it to a commercial entity for their use.
It is more unenforceable since the LICENSE file in the repository clearly states that I can "deal in the Software without restriction", and that includes the right to "sell copies of the Software".
What's unenforceable? The non-commercial clause or the commercial clause? It's a contradiction.
The intent is not at all clear.
Does the author not mind people making money so long as they give back to the community? If so, then copyleft with exceptions by the license holder could be a compromise.
Does the author not want people making money at all without explicit permission? Then no open-source license will suffice and it should have been put under a non-commercial license or left without a license at all so that the default copyright restrictions apply.
You say that this project is MIT licensed and therefore available for you to use commercially. Is this true? The license section in the README clearly says not to use it for commercial purposes. Which takes precedence?
This is an amazing project and level of effort, and I empathize deeply with this photographers desire for a clean, simple, beautiful camera.
I so deeply want a modern EVF camera, doesn’t even have to be a rangefinder, with a mechanically wound shutter so the film advance lever has a reason to exist.
incredible project but unless I'm misunderstanding what he is comparing it to, this is only a few hundred dollars/euros less than a used leica m digital body per a quick ebay search.
Thanks! I'm comparing with the latest Ms, I'm not gonna buy old tech. I want also autofocus which this cameras don't have. It might be fun to manual focus with their lenses (also expensive) but I don't see myself doing this all the time.
A lot of the Leica-branded lenses have an aperture ring that doesn't work on Olympus bodies. Besides that, both brands have proprietary lens + body stabilization that only work if the lenses and bodies match.
This is batshit insane, and I fully fully endorse this person's madness to do such things. This is what the internet is _for_
Going straight into making a camera is very much a bold move.
my next comment isn't for the author, as they have strong enough opinions on cameras to do this. But for everyone else, I have greatly enjoyed fujifilms line of cameras.
I borrowed a gfx100s from work, and my word is a wonderful machine. (it should be for the price) for more normal budgets, the x series is great. Unlike a canon what you see is what you get, and the autofocus works on objects rather than the closest fucking thing it sees.
Something is terribly wrong with the patent system if anything about sticking the innards of a commercially-produced camera into a different-shaped metal case is patentable.
I'm sure a number of things are terribly wrong with the patent system. Amazon's one-click patent is another that comes to mind. Patents are for how, and the how there is "store the default payment and shipping info in a database".
I'm sure that some of these patents happen by slipping the examiner a few bands in the application paperwork. Afterwards it's on other people to defend themselves to the tune of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if they lose you can get an entire company and all of its IP, property, and money.
$5k under the table is a small price to pay for such potential payoff, not to mention the value of the chilling effect on competition.
It's unethical, seedy, shitty, banal, and pestilent, the kind of thing that only the most hellbound and soulless of sleazebags would ever even think of to do, but it's profitable.
How many patents do you have? Or are you just making assumptions and defaming people who could very well do an honest day's work? I assume the people at the US Patent Office go through thousands of patents, I would imagine it can get pretty exhausting reading each and every patent, especially after you ran through hundreds of unpatentable documents. You literally have to look up prior patents, and make sure its not already a thing, and figure out, is this really the same or not?
Funnily enough, one of my former bosses has one or two patents on something really simple that he came up with. It's a really clever piece of tech that the military uses, stupid simple to implement too.
There are design patents specifically for looks[1], in other countries such as the UK where I am from this is known as registering a design rather than using the word 'patent'[2].
As someone who's been doing mechanical product engineering for 30+ years, doing this as a first project is way more than jumping off the deep end. Impressive.
I’m just a hobbyist 3D user but I feel like I have good experience, been using Autodesk Inventor then Fusion since early high school…
I saw the level of detail in the model and am shocked. If this is truly their first experience with CAD/CAM they are a natural.
For example - here’s my home built camera. It’s massively more simplistic: https://blog.maxg.io/phase-one-swc/
BTW, if you want to design some models for 3D printing but the only thing you know to do is to code, you can use OpenSCAD & program the obejcrs into existence:
https://openscad.org/
Also recommend using the BOSL2 library with OpenSCAD - it turnes an already very powerful tool into something insane:
https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2
Hey, this is super interesting! Thanks for sharing. I have been playing with using the Python console/scripts/macros in FreeCAD to create 3D models. I found this to be very friendly for my programmer mindset. I have learned a bit of onshape, tinkercad, blender and freecad, but I find it extremely tedious and full of unknowns that I struggle to make sense of and resolve (e.g. contraints in freecad, sometimes I just don't know how to add the missing constraints, or just adding text to a curved face in literally all programs, it's never as easy as click the face add text, there are always gotcha's).
I wonder how does openscad compare to FreeCADs python, if you know. I just found https://pythonscad.org/ which looks interesting, but then, the BOSL2 library looks super interesting and important for a good user experience, so I do not know if the PythonSCAD could somehow just import it and use it.
I guess there's homework for me to do here, but if anyone has the experience to get a hint of "what is the best/easiest python-based programming way of doing 3D modeling", I'd be forever thankful for sharing their thoughts.
LLMs are really good at writing Python, so iterating over a model in code I found is really quick, and I really enjoy the process. Meanwhile clicking so many times in so many menus makes me desist on designing anything more-or-less complex.
Just got a 3D printer and was curious what the best practice was for generating objects in code and then outputting to a printer.
Thanks for sharing!
Another, arguably even more powerful, alternative is Rhino + Grasshopper. Grasshopper is often used for generative designs, but can include arbitrary Python nodes and can even be used for "parametrically" designed functional parts.
Grasshopper can also output gcode directly [1], enabling pretty wild things like [2].
[1]: https://interactivetextbooks.tudelft.nl/rhino-grasshopper/Gr...
[2]: https://www.instagram.com/medium_things/
This is really cool, I had no idea this existed. Thanks for sharing!
Wow super cool. I’ve always wanted a Hasselblad SWC, but now I think I want what you built even more ;)
Thanks! It was surprisingly challenging to get right, in fact that body is slightly misaligned somewhere (possibly the lens…).
Does the Phase One back have a preview screen on it, or are you just sort of eyeballing what's in the frame?
Also, I noticed a lot of photos of the olympics on your flickr page. Are you in West Seattle, too, by any chance?
Most of the modern ones do - anything from the IQ1-IQ4 has a good preview screen, for live view specifically you need a CMOS sensor based one like the IQ3 100 or the IQ4 150. The CCD ones technically do live view but it's really not good. So this only works for backs that are fairly expensive still...
Close to West Seattle! I'm in the North Seattle area and walk around near the water there a lot.
ah right on, thanks for the info
It may be simplistic, but that's a cracking photo you've taken on it.
Thank you, I appreciate that!
Agreed, both the pcb and 3d design was very well done. I'd love to do something similar (on a smaller camera lol)
> So what else qualifies me to do this camera?
I understand the urge to say this to potential blog readers. But you're not actually selling us anything. Who cares if you're qualified or not? You built it and you're telling us what you learned.
I appreciated the context.
The Panasonic GX series of cameras was very similar to what we see here, and prices for them remain elevated years past their discontinuation. I'm a little surprised they haven't introduced a new model in that lineup.
The Fuji X-E5 also seems similar to this, though obviously with a different lens mount.
GM-5 is probably the greatest pocket-size mirrorless, and maybe the last. The GX-85 is also great, but it does have a larger grip and more of a shoulder at the top.
The G-100D is also quite small, but the faux pentaprism at the top makes it just a bit too big to justify being MFT.
https://petapixel.com/2025/06/28/the-panasonic-lumix-gm-5-is...
I have a GM1, it's truly a standout camera. GM5 makes it even better. It's quite funny nobody wants to attempt similar sizes, even when the market has voted for pocketable cameras.
Especially OM - with all their troubles, if it were me I'd have pivoted the company to sizes that do justice to the mount's inherent size advantage. They have a rich legacy of amazing small cameras (Trip, Pen, XA series, and the overrated mju ii) - yet it's fuji selling an order of magnitude more x-halfs than anything OM is producing.
If they just remade it with modern AF software, I'd probably carry mine around most every I went. Not to mention what they could do by updating hardware.
I'm not sure there's a lot of improvement possible purely in software with a contrast detect system and an old processor.
In December I bought a GX-85. I love it even though it's 9 years old and still uses micro-USB. I got a great deal on it - $300.
It doesn't seem like it would take a lot to keep this line going. Bump the sensor, change the USB cable, add GPS, etc... but keep the form factor.
I guess the market just isn't big enough.
I have a GX-8 and I still like it...
Still using GX1 here.
I have to say I'm a bit unimpressed with the efforts of the MFT consumer system camera manufacturers. Panasonic creates excellent cameras, they're so big it lessens the appeal of the smaller mount. OM makes cameras of the right size, but it's releasing new models really really slowly, with mediocre sensors. The OM-5 mark II is a lame rehash. Only the OM-3 is somewhat exciting, but it sacrifices too much in terms of ergonomics to achieve an aesthetic I don't care about.
On the other hand there's no other class of camera that really works on vacation/travel and is meaningfully better than a smartphone. Oh, well.
I think people really underestimate how nice it is for the lenses to be smaller and not just for the camera to be.
I wonder if there's a marketing reason for not shrinking the lenses. A big lens screams "better" more than a smaller lens at a casual glance for the uninitiated user.
It's an engineering reason really, the entire reason why MFTs were so popular when they came out was because people were tired of lugging around their Full-Frame camera's zoom lens, and were sick of missing moments when using a prime lens.
The marketing gimmick for awhile was ultra-zooms which allow for smaller lenses via fixing distortion using DSP, but this degrades the image quality, and so never became a solution for RAW shooters.
I think it's directly related to sensor size and given the shape of lenses (cylinders) that means bigger sensors should probably have a non linear relationship to lens size.Though it is probably not quite that simple. In any case, bigger lenses allow for smaller f stops with a given focal length, and people really do love bokeh...
I doubt it. I don’t think anyone is spending $2k on Canon L-series (red ring) lenses based on the size. On the high end, photographers are pretty discerning about equipment’s capabilities. If they made my Canon EF 35mm f1.4L USM II half the size and weight I’d be thrilled.
The RF version of that lens is a bit lighter.
Bigger lenses tend to gather more light and that means better images in darker moments.
The volume for physical cameras is low and shrinking. The companies can't justify putting nearly the same investment as smartphone companies selling 100x the units can.
The volume for cameras like this was always low. Even in the days before you had a camera on your smartphone, people were buying Polaroids, compact cameras with a small lens built in, or disposable cameras. They weren't buying something more complicated unless they were hobbyist photographers.
Not hobby. Taking photo is always key to life for many.
Before phone for major event like graduation, wedding and baby birth people do buy one camera with one lens for the occasion and keep it as a family heirloom like. And even students gala and performances. Whilst a lot of point and shot, slr and later dslr are common. The key it is not a hobby to them but a life even to record.
Unlike people like us canon and nikon found it hard to sell the second lens or even second body.
Those compact cameras with a built in lens still funded the R&D for the expensive cameras. They can all run the same OS and software, etc. Smartphones have continuously chipped away at the bottom tier of cameras to the point where even hobbyist photographers use smartphones. And only the absolute top tier of very expensive cameras still exist.
The OM-3 is fine ergonomically, for me at least. The thumb pad on the back is very comfortable and balances the body very well. I held off buying one for a while because of ergonomic concerns but in practice it’s been great.
I'm super happy with my OM10 mark3 and z9. the first is super fun to use and gives a really satisfying shitter kachunk when you shoot and the z9 though a chonker makes adjusting stuff easy having a billion buttons
>On the other hand there's no other class of camera that really works on vacation/travel and is meaningfully better than a smartphone.
My a6500 is serving me well, though I guess it depends what you mean by "meaningfully better than a smartphone". I do end up with a lot more photos that I like when I go on vacation with a camera than with just a smartphone
Edit: also applies to commuting, but I'm always a bit uneasy about having my camera with me when comutting.
Olympus is one of the few camera (I literally have hundreds as this is my side hobby) I love to use. Until every time I want to change anything. As a guy who can do 8x10, gfx, 907x, z9 etc I still find the menu system totally confusing.
It is not the hardware, it is the software …
I don't know, man. They're very customizable, and some models have memory banks. I never need to go in the menus of my pen-f. And The OM-1 has a much improved menu system, with a customizable "my menu" page, which opens directly, on which you can stick your most used menu items (but, sadly, it's not included in the saved memory banks).
Furthermore, I find the physical buttons on the om1 are so customizable and can do so many things, that I never go in the menu, either. I haven't tried new models from the other makers, but the olympus models I have are much nicer to use than my old canon 40d and nikon d80.
I had to think about this a while since my Olympus is my go to camera just because I love using it but I agree some of the menus are mildly confusing....though leaps ahead of sony
I'm very happy with my thoroughly behind-the-curve E-M10, and I'm secretly glad the newer ones aren't all that great because I don't have to spend money on upgrading.
> Only the OM-3 is somewhat exciting, but it sacrifices too much in terms of ergonomics to achieve an aesthetic I don't care about.
I was very disappointed with the om3. I love the aesthetic, but I feel it's half-assed. The faux-pentaprism bump is the specific point I hate. If it had the body of a pen-f, I would have been all over it. As it is, it's just a prettier om-1 with worse ergonomics.
I should note that I already have a pen-f, and don't have any issue with its ergonomics (I used it yesterday on -5ºC with big gloves, it was fine). Since I don't lug around foot-long lenses, the lack of grip isn't a problem.
This is amazing. It's such a shame that Olympus and Panasonic have largely abandoned the small camera market within the M43 system. I really wish another manufacturer would step up and build something similar to the GX85, which is still one of my favorite walkaround cameras.
FWIW, Olympus spun-off/sold their consumer camera division. It's now operating as OM System (1) and has released a few new cameras over the past few years. As the article mentioned, the latest is the OM-3, which is sort of similar form factor, but not exactly compact. They also have the smaller Pen EP-7, but it's not available in the US (though they're readily available on Ebay or via KEH etc). I bought an EP-7 for an earlier Xmas gift to myself, but haven't had much change to use it (previously had an EP-5 and E-M5ii).
1 - https://explore.omsystem.com/us/en/
They are no Pentax Q which is ridiculously small and maybe not the best design lens / shutter wise as a lot of the in-lens shutters seem to fail...
Meh, I love my Olympus cameras, but I wouldn't call the latest models exactly small. The OM1 is pretty huge, even though it's smaller than the ridiculous Panasonic G9. I think it's close to the Sony a7 line and the canon r6, which are full-frame. Of course, if you're into long lenses, it wipes the floor with them, if the compromise works for you. On the wide end, the advantage isn't as clear-cut, though nobody else has anything comparable to the 8-25.
What I'm hoping to see is a new penf. When it came out, they somehow managed to cram into that small body almost everything the em1 had at the time. The om3 is pretty small, too, but for some reason they decided to keep the faux-pentaprism bump. It would have been great if it had the viewfinder to the side.
The Pen EP-7 is the same size as the older EP-5. With any of the Olympus prime lenses, it's about as small as you get (ignoring the Pentax Q, which was ridiculously tiny).
But 100% agree on the OM-1 and OM-3. They're smaller than many APS-C bodies, especially once you add a lens, but they're nowhere near pocketable, not even in a jacket pocket. And I feel like the OM-3 was a bit of a miss - it should have been a "rangefinder" form factor (no pentaprism hump) and a few mm smaller in each dimension. And marketed as a Pen-F. That said, the camera itself seems to be pretty darn good - basically a slightly smaller, vintage-vibe OM-1. Once used examples hit the market, I'll be tempted to buy one.
My parents both shoot Nikon DSLRs and I chuckle every time they break out their birding lenses (400mm NIKKOR of some sort). It's as big as my forearm and fills half a backpack. My Lumix 100-300 (yeah, not quite apple-to-apple) is minuscule in comparison. [I don't do enough wildlife to bother with a more expensive telephoto).
I just bought a GX9 5 years after selling my whole system cause I missed the form factor so much. M43 really is the best compromise between size and image quality imo, with the caveat that I'm not a professional. No other mount lets me casually EDC an 80-300 equivalent lens.
There's Esquisse (https://esquisse.camera/) trying to step up, but it's still in the very early stages.
Fujis X-E5 seems on paper very comparable to GX85? https://www.dpreview.com/products/compare/side-by-side?produ...
That looks amazing. I wish I could justify it (I'm a terrible photographer).
This post, where someone from one field decides to do something they love but in another field, reminds me of the below:
At my kids' elementary school there is a yearly "Dad's Night" show where the dads get up and do skits, dance, sing and/or make funny videos.
You get to see dads who sell insurance or are lawyers do dance numbers that look professionally choreographed or make music videos that look like they could have been on MTV.
It's a reminder that "The Sort" pulls people very strongly into certain fields but there is always that question, from the movie Up In The Air and asked by George Clooney, "How much did they pay you to give up your dream?" [0]
Part of me is VERY excited to see AI/LLMs help facilitate this for the people who always thought "I have always wanted to write a piece of software but didn't know how and now I can!"
0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkX-TPaodoM
This is awesome! Great work. The "do first, ask questions later" mindset is inspiring as it's so easy (for me at least) to get stuck forever in a preparation / ideas phase.
I would also love to see some photos taken with it.
Not sure if any use this camera. But dude hangs out with a lot of ballet dancers it seems
https://www.instagram.com/cristi.baluta
Unless something went terribly wrong, they'll look just like photos taken with a Panasonic G9 II. Samples from that camera are readily available online.
> the lens should be as centered as possible. I wanted to avoid that horrendous look of cameras with the lens as close to the left edge as possible (Sony a6000, I’m looking at you here).
Funny, the things some people obsess about :)
The loveliest part of making your own gear is picking all your nits.
The only thing really wrong about the Sony a6000 is the lack of weatherproofing. With even a 55-210 kit lens and maybe a good filter, you can still get amazing quality from far away - such as being able to pick apart finer architectural details of a monument that’s about 5-6mi away.
a6000 is APS-C, so 1.5x crop factor, 55-210 therefore is equivalent to 72.5-315 full frame. At 5-6 miles away that would mean each of your pixels (24mp sensor I think?) are something like, a 16-19cm square. I don't know if it's enough for architectural detail. I feel like it wouldn't, I have a cathedral I often take pictures of, at 1km it's okay, kinda fills the frame on the 55-210, at 3 miles (~5km) it's really small in the frame.
Practically and ergonomically I prefer a centered lens. Your hand has to reach less far to reach the focus ring and aperture control. Most slr cameras have buttons on both sides of the lens, so developing muscle memory is easier when those actions are split between each hand. Rotation of the camera is also much more natural. It also centers the lens' pov between your eyes, matching their parallax, which is really important for composing the photograph outside of the viewfinder.
> It also centers the lens' pov between your eyes, matching their parallax, which is really important for composing the photograph outside of the viewfinder.
The compact sonys have the viewfinder in the top-left corner, so having the mount to the side improves the paralax situation, although doesn't remove it.
Huh? You reach towards the lens from the bottom left and thus a centered position puts a corner of the camera body in the way.
I had my directions reversed, so the extra reach doesn't really apply, I suppose, but I think aligned to the right side (when looking into the lens) is even worse. I maybe see what you mean about your hand hitting the body, but i actually want that; my grip has me resting the body along much of my left hand and cradled in my palm. That is really important to stability for me, it gives me an extra stop to work with.
All personal preference I guess!
When I was shopping, I was comparing the Sony Alphas with the Fujifilm XT line.
And in reviews, complaints were made that the lens (and view finder) being centered in the XT means you squish your nose against the screen in the back.
But... I just liked the look and dials of the XT-5 so much more than the barebones boxy look of the α6700.
(Sony has meaningfully better autofocus too, I'll be sad, but I wanted the nice looking body...)
And yes my nose squishes against that back screen.
I just got the XT-5 too - not for the form but because the feature set is so good. However, I don't get this obsession on centred viewfinders - they could be anywhere on the camera body now they are digital; they may as well be on the left side where my nose isn't going to be smudging the screen.
The camera is fantastic, though.
A6000 and A6600 owner checking in : I love the boxy look! The viewfinder on the left makes lining up long shots kinda hard though. I have to zoom out to 50mm find my subject (birds) then zoom back to 400mm+, so I have been eyeing the more expensive models just to have it in the center. Idk if it would even help lol.
My only camera is a Sony a6000 and I bought it partially because I thought it looked great. If it causes some issue I wouldn't even know it because I've never tried something else.
Also funny the opposite preference, I like the offset lenses looks cool
Going from mostly centered lenses on dslr and m43 cameras to Sony with lens on mostly left side, I do prefer the offset lenses. Ergonomically and looks-wise both.
It only makes sense if one wants boat a left and right handed camera st the same time. But then it's got the dials on the wrong side.
Very impressive build! It's amazing what one can do thanks to CNC and FLPCB manufacturing services readily available to any motivated hacker.
One tip for the author who noticed the camera being warm: measure its power consumption, and compare to an unmodified G9ii. Especially because you noticed it drains the battery relatively quickly(!) This is a glaring "connect the dots" situation to me. The root cause might be something very stupid. For example when you removed the microphone jack, the camera thought a microphone was connected, so it activated a microphone nenu. But given the extensive number of mods you made, it's possible you are making the firmware think some accessory is connected—could be anything: (light) flash, external screen, USB gadget, JTAG reader, SD card, etc. So it's taking a code path to initialize the device, but it fails because the device is not present, and it retries repeatedly, thus entering a retry loop that's causing excessive CPU usage... That wouldn't surprise me. You are running a G9ii that's unique therefore a rare software code path like this would not happen on a standard G9ii and would never have been fixed by the developers.
Edit: I see the author measured power here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lumix/comments/1oif3jp/how_much_doe... and to my eyes, these seem really high numbers. For example in video playback mode he measures 340mA, so 2.45W (battery is 7.2V nominal). The standard G9ii battery is 16Wh that means it would last only 6.5 hours playing back video. Compare this to a Pixel 9 phone: 18.3Wh battery and can playback video for 15 hours (I believe these are benchmark numbers reported playing back 4k H264 video, probably in a similar-ish format to the G9ii in terms of bitrate, etc). Plus the phone is at a disadvantage as it has a bigger, more power-hungry display. So it seems to me his G9ii consumes twice as much power as it should, if not more... If anything a pro camera should be more optimized than a general-purpose consumer device when playing video!
Amazing work, and so inspiring! The size difference compared to the G9ii made it all worth it!
Lately I've been converting a few old 5k iMac's to work as external displays, and I had a thought about making my own housing for the display instead of using the iMac chassis. This gives me some motivation to look into it further!
Care to share what driver board you have used?
Sure. The exact seller I purchased from doesn't have the product, but in AliExpress if you search...
"For iMac A1419 A2115 5K LCD Screen Driver Board LM270QQ1 LM270QQ2 Retinal Control Motherboard 5120*2880 QQHD HDMI DP Type-c"
...it will come up with what I have used in the last few conversions.
Though I have seen Quinn Nelson (Snazzy Labs on YouTube) released a video recently that shows his process which is a bit more involved, but better. Apparently his method is better to remove risks of power surges from the controller board (I haven't experienced it yet...!), but his method also retains the speakers, and relocates the I/O inputs to be more accessible.
Oh, that effort.
I’ve been thinking about putting an MFT mount on my RX100 to use it with more interesting lenses (I have it for the high frame rate capability) but concluded it to be way too much effort and risk.
And then along comes a person with enough determination to build an entire custom case! Truly impressive.
I saw footage someone captured when they modified their Canon 1D to use a PL mount. They then mounted a 17mm, iirc, that in a slow shutter could capture as many photons as my shitty 20mm EF mount could do in a 5s long exposure in bulb mode. The front piece of glass on that 17mm was ginormous. I really wish I could remember the guy's name to find a link. He mounted that camera to the front of a fishing boat down the canyon river pushed by the current navigating in the dark with night vision goggles. The resulting timelapse was glorious.
There was something specific to the body of the 1D that allowed for the proper flange depth of PL lenses that the other Canon bodies did not work for this mod.
Wow! This is the kind of news that we want on hacker news in 2026. Amazing hacker ethos.
The article could have been better with sharing some photos taken with the new camera.
Agreed, this is some proper nice tinkering writeup that we get far too rarely now.
Lovely project! I'm a software guy who in recent years does lots of CAD for hobby projects (mainly robotics) and orders custom machined parts (lots of sheet metal construction, occasionally milled parts) along with 3D printing.
I find parametric modelling very zen. Stacking operations is very Lego-like, like stringing up pure functions. Plus I can listen to podcasts while I model, but not while I write code - it engages the brain differently.
Now that LLMs are sapping some of the joy out of programming (I use the tools, they're productive, achieving goals and delivering user value is still satisfying, etc. - but the act of writing code is just more enjoyable than prompting, so it's a tad dispiriting that it's getting harder to jusitify) I also find that I get a lot of satisfaction from doing something with my hands. In some ways it's a safer space for technical creativity.
Can highly recommend hobbies like this.
You're saying you don't want to hear how someone then stuffed AI into their camera?
Imagine a camera that uses one AI to transcribe the image the sensor picked up, and then another one to use the transcription to generate the image.
No need to imagine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36139729
Paragraphica is a lensless, sensorless camera that, when you press the shutter, compiles a bunch of data with GPS, location, time of day etc, and feeds it to an image generator to create the image.
Any chemists or crystallographers out here?
I recently got curious about whether nature solves the Bayer pattern problem and if so, how.
Are there any 3 element crystalline compounds with the formula A_2BC with roughly same sized atoms for A, B and C ?
If they have a 2D tiling that would nature's Bayer pattern.
Natured solved it in our eyes by doing non-uniform placements of rods and cones (rather than uniform fixed pattern) and then fixing it in “software”.
Yes! As an optical engineer, I heard endless complaints about how the camera doesn't "see" like our eyes do.
Even the 1990s cameras were far superior to a "static picture" from our eyes: color everywhere, instead of mostly in the fovea, no blind spot, etc.
What they lacked was: higher resolution wherever you chose to concentrate within the scene at one moment, jagged lines if they weren't perfectly aligned (your eyes correct near-lines to be LINES), and (in the 1990s) lower peak resolution.
(Weirdly, people used to argue that "digital would NEVER have better resolution than film, even though it was clearly trending upwards to and past that static goal...).
Agreed.
more like wetware :)
What about the x-trans pattern?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujifilm_X-Trans_sensor
No picture from the camera. Stoic.
The hobby of caring about cameras sometimes overtakes the hobby of taking pictures.
It's kind of a meme within the photography community though. People will spend many thousands of dollars on a camera that's supposedly "the best" (pick your fave reasons, ideally as obscure as possible) and then not actually shoot with it. Looking at yall, Leica fans.
Indeed. Collecting cameras, and talking about cameras, is a very different hobby from photography. That's OK! Both can be fun.
Inspired me to write this blog post: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/04/20/hobbies.html
There's a saying about how typical people use their audio system to listen to music, but audiophiles use music to listen to their audio system. An equivalent should be made for photography.
Pretty neat that you can do this nowadays and it only costs $3,000 instead of $30,000
The camera they want is also the camera I want. I say this as someone who still regularly shoots with an Olympus Pen-F and also has a Fuji X100VI, and primarily shoots a Nikon Z8 but wishes there was a more compact entry into FF. I actually really like the m4/3/MFT format, especially for travel photography, but it's a struggle because the best lenses are Pana/Leica and the best bodies are OM/Oly, and neither has done much to really develop the technology in the last 10 years. MFT feels dead, but even as a dead format, nothing compares to the size/weight flexibility it gives you.
It's a nice build, but there is a baffling discordance between putting all this time and money into making a CNC body and ripping the ports off a $1900 camera's motherboard with pliers when the soldering iron didn't do the job rather than waiting until you could get a hot air rig, which could easily have destroyed the motherboard by peeling a trace or cracking layers. I guess at a certain point you just have too much money to behave rationally.
>>> …them myself with a manual tapping tool. Well, that didn’t go well, it was hard to keep the tool straight, the threads were loose, and broke few taps rendering the holes useless.
Cheap taps from Amazon?
The haters will hate, but tap guides are great (e.g. https://biggatortools.com/v-tapguide-faqs, but even a block of hard wood with a clearance hole drilled in it works fine).
Unless you're tapping something super tough (306?), Amazon taps are fine for hand tapping. Go in straight, use a good lubricant.
I've got two of those tap guides, one for US and one for metric. They're great. Also for drilling since I don't have a drill press at home.
I've examined cheap taps under a microscope. Maybe they are of varying quality, but the ones I got had burrs all along the cutting edges. A tap that I borrowed from a machine shop was flawless in comparison. So maybe the middle ground is caveat emptor.
Another trick for tapping is to use something pointy in the drill chuck to center the tap after drilling, assuming you've clamped down your workpiece in a drill press or mill. This works for really big taps when you don't have a guide for them. Likewise the tailstock of a lathe can be used for this purpose.
I do not know if the author/creator is a user here on HN. But if you are, then absolutely amazing work. I love everything about it! You really did create a much more aesthetically pleasing camera and must have learned a ton along the way. I applaud your courage and/or naïveté to even undertake a project like this for no other reason than because you want it to exist.
It's crazy that it costs like 3x the cost of the camera to do a fancy case swap, and that's still cheaper than the camera it's designed to look like.
A weird contradiction for the licensing [0]:
> This project is open-source under the MIT License. Feel free to modify and use — but no commercial use without permission.
[0] https://github.com/cristibaluta/Leica-G9ii?tab=readme-ov-fil...
I wouldn’t call it weird. But it’s unenforceable.
This kind of thing works better with GPL. General use falls under GPL. If that doesn’t suit your commercial use, contact the copyright holder for another license.
As it stands, I can use the MIT licensed project anyway I like, including handing it to a commercial entity for their use.
It's no more unenforceable than GPL is unenforceable.
But MIT + weird condition is radioactive to anyone who takes licensing seriously.
Might just as well write "for hobbyist use only".
It is more unenforceable since the LICENSE file in the repository clearly states that I can "deal in the Software without restriction", and that includes the right to "sell copies of the Software".
except
What's unenforceable? The non-commercial clause or the commercial clause? It's a contradiction.
The intent is not at all clear.
Does the author not mind people making money so long as they give back to the community? If so, then copyleft with exceptions by the license holder could be a compromise.
Does the author not want people making money at all without explicit permission? Then no open-source license will suffice and it should have been put under a non-commercial license or left without a license at all so that the default copyright restrictions apply.
You say that this project is MIT licensed and therefore available for you to use commercially. Is this true? The license section in the README clearly says not to use it for commercial purposes. Which takes precedence?
Thanks for pointing out, it is AI bullshit, I generated the structure of the readme and didn't look what it wrote there. I'll fix on my next push.
> I still don’t have the camera I imagined,
lol. Sounds like every passion project, ever.
I have friends who have worked on their car project, their bathroom project, their workshop project, their custom pc build, even the home they built.
I wonder if anyone has ever built something and said... "It is perfect, I am satisfied!"
Maybe just from the outside. Like the casio f91w, the ak47, the porsche 959 or the hersheys bar.
This is an amazing project and level of effort, and I empathize deeply with this photographers desire for a clean, simple, beautiful camera.
I so deeply want a modern EVF camera, doesn’t even have to be a rangefinder, with a mechanically wound shutter so the film advance lever has a reason to exist.
I’m aware of the Epson R1 but 6MP is too low.
The Fuji X-Half has a wind lever.
https://shopusa.fujifilm-x.com/x-half-x-half/
Yes it does - I have one - it’s simply a button basically. Not the same feel as something like a Leica
reminded me of camera-from-a-scanner project I saw not so long ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSvjJGbFCws
incredible project but unless I'm misunderstanding what he is comparing it to, this is only a few hundred dollars/euros less than a used leica m digital body per a quick ebay search.
Thanks! I'm comparing with the latest Ms, I'm not gonna buy old tech. I want also autofocus which this cameras don't have. It might be fun to manual focus with their lenses (also expensive) but I don't see myself doing this all the time.
Maybe, but that camera isn’t what they wanted either (other than the body shell).
This is an incredible project! Thanks for sharing. Love to see some photos taken in this camera!
A triumph. I love this.
> the Lumix lenses are crippled on Olympus bodies
Are they?
A lot of the Leica-branded lenses have an aperture ring that doesn't work on Olympus bodies. Besides that, both brands have proprietary lens + body stabilization that only work if the lenses and bodies match.
Don't they have adapters for all that now?
As mentioned in the next clause of that sentence, the aperture ring does not work on Olympus bodies.
This is batshit insane, and I fully fully endorse this person's madness to do such things. This is what the internet is _for_
Going straight into making a camera is very much a bold move.
my next comment isn't for the author, as they have strong enough opinions on cameras to do this. But for everyone else, I have greatly enjoyed fujifilms line of cameras.
I borrowed a gfx100s from work, and my word is a wonderful machine. (it should be for the price) for more normal budgets, the x series is great. Unlike a canon what you see is what you get, and the autofocus works on objects rather than the closest fucking thing it sees.
Title is misleading — if you read to the end, he did not end up with a usable camera.
Yet.
Gives a sense of how infuriating the G9ii update was to G9 users. The guts are ergonomically better off in a rangefinder body than what Panny shipped.
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Off topic: why do people keep posting on medium?
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Wow, that's cool.
If there is anything that can be patented, I'd make sure to patent it.
Something is terribly wrong with the patent system if anything about sticking the innards of a commercially-produced camera into a different-shaped metal case is patentable.
If Nintendo can patent game mechanics despite prior art, anything’s possible.
I'm sure a number of things are terribly wrong with the patent system. Amazon's one-click patent is another that comes to mind. Patents are for how, and the how there is "store the default payment and shipping info in a database".
I'm sure that some of these patents happen by slipping the examiner a few bands in the application paperwork. Afterwards it's on other people to defend themselves to the tune of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if they lose you can get an entire company and all of its IP, property, and money.
$5k under the table is a small price to pay for such potential payoff, not to mention the value of the chilling effect on competition.
It's unethical, seedy, shitty, banal, and pestilent, the kind of thing that only the most hellbound and soulless of sleazebags would ever even think of to do, but it's profitable.
How many patents do you have? Or are you just making assumptions and defaming people who could very well do an honest day's work? I assume the people at the US Patent Office go through thousands of patents, I would imagine it can get pretty exhausting reading each and every patent, especially after you ran through hundreds of unpatentable documents. You literally have to look up prior patents, and make sure its not already a thing, and figure out, is this really the same or not?
Funnily enough, one of my former bosses has one or two patents on something really simple that he came up with. It's a really clever piece of tech that the military uses, stupid simple to implement too.
I rather think that issuing patents was incentivized in various ways, leading to more bad patents being issued.
There's prior art (centuries old!) on Mickey Mouse's head.
There are design patents specifically for looks[1], in other countries such as the UK where I am from this is known as registering a design rather than using the word 'patent'[2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent [2]: https://www.gov.uk/register-a-design
Why would you even give a shit about patents for a hobby?