The basic principles of a motion picture film camera should be well understood by most readers — after all, it’s been well over a hundred years since the Lumière brothers wowed 19th century Paris with their first films. But making one yourself is another matter entirely, as they are surprisingly complex and high-precision devices. This hasn’t stopped [Henry Kidman] from giving it a go though, and what makes his camera more remarkable is that it’s 3D printed.

The problem facing a 16mm movie camera designer lies in precisely advancing the film by one frame at the correct rate while filming, something done in the past with a small metal claw that grabs each successive sprocket. His design eschews that for a sprocket driven by a stepper motor from an Arduino. His rotary shutter is driven by another stepper motor, and he has the basis of a good camera.

The tests show promise, but he encounters a stability problem, because as it turns out, it’s difficult to print a 16mm sprocket in plastic without it warping. He solves this by aligning frames in post-processing. After fixing a range of small problems though, he has a camera that delivers a very good picture quality, and that makes us envious.

Sadly, those of us who ply our film-hacking craft in 8mm don’t have the luxury of enough space for a sprocket to replace the claw.

The Raspberry Pi has been used for many things over its lifetime, and we’re guessing that many of you will have one in perhaps its most common configuration, as a small server. [Thibault] has a Pi 4 in this role, and it’s used to back up the data from his VPS in a data centre. The Pi 4 may be small and relatively affordable, but it’s no slouch in computing terms, so he was extremely surprised to see it showing a transfer speed in bytes per second rather than kilobytes or megabytes. What was up? He set out to find the bottleneck.

We’re treated to a methodical step-through of all the constituent parts of the infrastructure between the data centre and the disk, and all of them show the speeds expected. Eventually, the focus shifts to the encryption he’s using, both on the USB disk connected to the Pi and within the backup program he’s using. As it turns out, while the Pi is good at many things, encryption is not its strong point. Some work with htop shows the cores maxed out as it tries to work with encrypted data, and he’s found the bottleneck.

To show just how useful a Pi server can be without the encryption, we’re using an early model to crunch a massive language corpus.

Header image: macrophile, CC BY 2.0.

When a wrist mounted keyboard floated past in the Hackaday feed, a mental image surfaced, perhaps something like a Blackberry keyboard mounted on a wrist cuff, maybe with some kind of display. It’s impressive indeed then to open the link and see [AdamLeBlanc]’s Schist01. It’s a wrist mounted keyboard, but with its bracket curving in front of the had to support a custom ergonomic chording keyboard, it’s definitely a break from the norm.

The wrist mount has clearly taken a lot of thought, and despite looking something like the arm of a Star Trek Borg, appears comfortable. It’s extremely adjustable, and can be demounted into several different parts. Meanwhile the keyboard itself has been formed to his hand by a trial and error process involving keycaps and a clay model. there’s even a thumb-operable touchpad.

We like this peripheral a lot, for the huge attention to detail that has gone into its design, for its boldness, and because we can’t help seeing ourselves using it as the input device for a futuristic head-mounted display. For now though we don’t have any futuristic silver clothing in the wardrobe, so that will have to wait. If you’d like to see more, there’s a video.

Thanks [Shotgun Moose] for the tip.

Almost uniquely among consumer grade computer manufacturers, the Raspberry Pi folks still support their earliest boards. We’re guessing that’s in part due to the much more recent Pi Zero using the same 32-bit system-on-chip, but it’s still impressive that a 13-year-old single board computer still has manufacturer OS support. With so many of these early boards out there, is there much you can do with them in 2025? [Jeff Geerling] gives it a try.

His test Pi is unusual in itself, the 2013 blue special edition that RS gave away in a social media promotion. Sadly we didn’t win one back in the day and neither did he, so he picked it up in an online auction. We’re treated to some very slow desktop exploration, but it’s clear that this is not where the strengths of a Pi 1 lie. It was reckoned at the time to be roughly equivalent to a Pentium II or Pentium III in PC terms, so that shouldn’t be a surprise. Instead he concludes that it’s better as a headless machine, though he notes how projects are starting to abandon 32 bit builds. The full video is below the break.

We asked the same question not so long ago, and the Hackaday Pi 1 now quietly analyses news content on its two-watt power budget. It’s still a useful little Linux box for your script-based projects even if it will never win any speed prizes.