Going in a completely different direction from my usual photographic interests, I recently picked up a totally plastic novelty toy camera – a multilens Actionsampler.

These cameras have four lenses in a two-by-two layout, which result in four 1/4-sized images on a single 35mm negative. The four mini-frames are taken sequentially (rather than simultaneously) so that the four mini-images are each a fraction-of-a-second apart. Thus, it lets you ‘sample’ some ‘action’.

Lomography Actionsampler

The camera has no focusing or exposure controls. The lenses have a 26mm focal length and the shutter speed seems to be about 1/100th. Focus is fixed, 1.2m to infinity. The aperture is unknown, but small – probably around f/11. They have some suggestions to vary the film speed based on the weather (sunny, cloudy, et cetera) but I’d ignore that and go with ISO 400 at the slowest. In fact I used ISO 800 and that was acceptable from bright daylight to dusk. Indoors it was inadequate – this is an outdoor daytime camera only.

The interval between pictures is listed as 0.22 seconds, so all four frames are taken in just under 3/4 seconds. With a 1/100 shutter speed, fast action will show some motion blur. Slow action may not show enough difference between the four frames, so there’s a trade-off to be had – either the four images will appear nearly identical, or you’re likely to see some bluring.

The camera does not take any batteries, winding and rewinding is simple and manual, and the shutter release is also a simple plastic button. There is no viewfinder as such – you frame your shots via a simple fold-up plastic frame. Or you just ‘shoot from the hip’ and hope for the best.

The camera is very light – 100 grams. It seems a little bulky and blocky, and feels like they could have made it smaller if they wanted. The size and light weight make it feel very, very cheap and toy-like. The biggest complaint I have though is actually the noise – when you trip the shutter, it makes a noise that is a bit unpleasant and quite noticable. Sort of a brief plastic grinding sound. I suspect it is a clockwork that causes the 0.22 second delay between each of the four shutters.

The Actionsampler’s four images start at the upper-left and end at the upper-right, moving anti-clockwise. With some practice one can figure out what kinds of motion / movement are most appropriate for this camera, and then I’m sure it would really shine. It does seem to love people, and although the focus is set for 1.2m to infinity, it’s mini-image format will make it happiest with people 1.2m to 5m. Not a great camera for landscapes or architectural shots, I think.

Overall, it’s not a good camera by any means. It’s a toy, and a novelty. So why’d I buy it? I was curious and I wanted to play!

Taking some time off from my MCP project while waiting for some more components to arrive, last night I put together a Meggy Jr. from Evil Mad Scientist Labs.

The Meggy Jr. is an open-source handheld video game platform. The ‘screen’ is an 8×8 matrix of RGB LEDs. Despite such a ‘low-rez screen’ there’s actually quite a few games out there that are very playable.

It comes with “Attack of the Cherry Tomatoes” pre-programmed on the uC and over a dozen more examples are included in the free development libraries, which work with the Arduino IDE.

I (heart) my Ice Tube Clock – another kit from Adafruit.

It was fun to build, and it’s just really fun to look at – high tech and old tech all together at once.

The past two months I’ve been obsessing on this electronics stuff. Thermostat. Kits. Soldering. Embedded devices.

It’s been “theraputic” – the point was to keep me busy, to keep my mind off of the depression and keep the dark thoughts away. Lately it’s been working less and less.

And the thing that’s coming up now is, I’m not sure if it’s even been fun. There’s the challenge, it’s satisfying to figure something out or make something work. But down to the nitty gritty of it – I don’t know if it’s been fun. If it’s been worth it.

I started doing a bit of cleaning and tidying today, and ended up gathering up all the electronic bits and pieces and stuff, and just putting it all in a big box. I still have lots of half-formed thoughts on things that I could make, but I don’t have the urge to actually make any of them.

The thermostat is finished, fully working. All I have to do is hook it up. It’s in the big box with the rest of the stuff. I even built a wireless outdoor temperature sensor last night, to radio the outside temp in so it could be displayed on the thermostat. That’s in the big box too.

I look at it all, and there’s no emotions. Was it fun? There sure were a heck of a lot of frustrations. Things not working, things that broke. And I don’t even want to think about how much money I spent on components, kits, parts, et cetera.

Was it supposed to be fun? At times it felt like homework – stuff I was doing because I had to. It was the assignment. Do that, or sit quietly in the dark and let my head fill up with images of death.

I guess I won’t put the big box away just yet — I’ll leave it out, and see if the urge strikes to open it and do more electronics stuff. Maybe install the thermostat. Or not. Whatever.

It’s a problem I’ve confessed to before. I love blinkin’ lights. LEDs, blinkins, flashins, flickering their magic little messages… and just recently, I’ve come across a wild and wonderful blinkin’ flasher that’s just plain blissful blinkin heaven.

Not only does it enchant and calm with it’s blinkins, but it also performs fun mathematical calculations. See, it’s based on Conway’s Game of Life.

It’s a GoL kit – modular boards, each with a 4×4 grid of cells (represented by LEDs). The boards can be linked to build larger and larger grids. I’ve started with 6 boards, for a 12 x 8 grid. It’s very addictive though. I already want to get another 6 boards and go to a 16×12 grid.

Here’s a short animation – it’s not perfect, there’s missing evolutions so the animation doesn’t exactly portray the way the game runs. But it’s close enough: a bunch of (seemingly) random flashes of LED light.

Bliss.

So I was thinking about trying some electronics, to see if I could revive any interest or ability there. I got a couple kits, one easy and one hard, but some stuff was missing so I went down to the electronics supply place to get some parts. Big disappointment, most of their retail operation is now discount / surplus junk, with electronics being relegated to a tiny little cramped and mostly out-of-stock corner.

So as I was on my way out, having found almost nothing I was looking for, I saw they had some toy remote-control helicopters on final-sale discount. I figured, meh. It might be fun for a few minutes. I’m so bad with R/C cars that I’d never be able to get insurance, but maybe it’d be amusing to crash a helicopter into things for a while. And it was either that or my big bag of disappointment, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

Well! Forget about the electronics kits – this little whirly-bird is supercool!

It’s super easy to fly! It only took me 3 or 4 big wipe-outs before I was able to do complete flights, like from take-off to landing. It flies with two counter-rotating main rotors, steers by varying the speed of one of the mains, and goes foreward / reverse by tilting the nose down or back, using a small rotor on the tail boom.

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So the first couple weeks with my Dingoo, I was messing with the native firmware, doing some hacks and coming up with a nice theme/skin for it, that sort of thing. I knew you could run Linux on there but I was sort of avoiding it, trying to just stick to the native firmware.

Then I started looking for a game, to take the place of Star Trek: Tactical Assault on the DS. Something that I could pick up and play for 5 or 10 minutes then leave, something that had challenging fly-around-and-shoot-stuff combat, but didn’t have a huge backstory or a long story-mode. (Yeah I know ST:TA has that, but I never play it, I just use Skirmish mode. I get a ship, the computer gets a ship, and we slug it out.)

So after a bunch of trial and error, it boiled down to an oldie-but-goodie: Star Control 2. Or rather, the modern opensource remake, Ur-Quan Masters. Yeah, long drawn-out story mode. Skip that: Super Melee mode. I get 14 ships. The computer gets 14 ships. We slug it out. Brilliant. The only catch? It’s not available for native firmware, only Dingux – that’s what they call Linux on the Dingoo.

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