Tonight I gave a presentation for the local PHP meetup. My presentation was on creating an address hunt order for geolocation using google maps. Basically, the idea is to try different combinations of an address that comes back with a geolocation failure until you get a set of coordinates. I hope that the presentation was interesting enough to be worth the other peoples time.
One of the other members in the group had mentioned the other month about hacking a digital camera. He couldn’t solder well enough to do it though. Last month, he brought some in for me to give a try at. I have had them sitting, waiting for me to work on them. Well, last night I gave it a go. Like most things where I wait to the last minute, it’s a no-go. I can’t find my de-soldering stuff. [As I wrote that last line, I remembered exactly where it is, in my RC car tool kit]
Anyway, here is the camera, it’s one of those disposable digital cameras. What does that say about our society, disposable digital cameras? Talk about a waste of resources!
The idea for this hack, is to unsolder the flash chip daughter card, and to solder on a standard flash socket. Now you can use the camera like any other digital camera.
Being that this hack is several years old – like 5 or so, I can probably buy a better camera for less than the parts cost this guy. But, that’s not the point. The point is to hack something cool from something cheap. I also can’t find instructions online anymore of exactly how to mod this thing. All the specific pages seem to have died. I am going to give it a go anyhow. There are only so many ways I can mess it up, I am bound to get it right at some point.
Now that I remember where my tools are, I can probably give one of these cameras a go this weekend.
This kinda reminds me of a MAKE Magizine motto: If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.
