Release Your Inner Ansel Adams With The Shitty Camera ChallengeSocial media microblogging has brought us many annoying things, but some of the good things that have come to us through its seductive scrolling are those ad-hoc interest based communities which congregate around a hashtag. There’s one which has entranced me over the past few years which I’d like to share with you; the Shitty Camera Challenge. The premise is simple: take photographs with a shitty camera, and share them online. The promise meanwhile is to free photography from kit acquisition, and instead celebrate the cheap, the awful, the weird, and the wonderful in persuading these photographic nonentities to deliver beautiful pictures.
Where’s The Hack In Taking A Photo?
Of course, we can already hear you asking where the hack is in taking a photo. And you’d be right, because any fool can buy a disposable camera and press the shutter a few times. But from a hardware hacker perspective this exposes the true art of camera hacking, because not all shitty cameras can produce pictures without some work.
The #ShittyCameraChallenge has a list of cameras likely to be considered shitty enough, they include disposables, focus free cameras, instant cameras, and the cheap plastic cameras such as Lomo or Holga. But also on the list are models which use dead film formats, and less capable digital cameras. It’s a very subjective definition, and thus in our field everything from a Game Boy camera or a Raspberry Pi camera module to a home-made medium format camera could be considered shitty. Ans since even the ready-made shitty cameras are usually cheap and unloved second-hand, there’s a whole field of camera repair and hacking that opens up. Finally, here’s a photography competition that’s fairly and squarely on the bench of Hackaday readers.

A Whole World Of Shitty Awesomeness Awaits!
Having whetted your appetite, it’s time to think about the different routes into camera hacking. Perhaps the simplest is to take a camera designed for an obsolete film format, and make a cartridge or spool that takes a commonly available film instead. Perhaps resurrecting an entire home movie standard is a little massochistic, but Thingiverse is full of 3D-printable adapters for more everyday film. Or you could make your own, as I did for my 1960s Agfa Rapid snapshot camera.
If hacking film cartridges seems a little low-tech, a camera whether film or digital is a simple enough device mechanically that making your own is not out of the question. At its simplest a pinhole camera can be made from trash, but we think if you’re handy with a CAD package and a 3D printer you should be able to do something better. Don’t be afraid to combine self-made parts with those from manufactured cameras; when every second hand store has a pile of near-worthless old cameras for relative pennies it makes sense to borrow lenses or other parts from this boanaza. And finally, you don’t need to be a film lover to join the fun, if a Raspberry Pi or an ESP cam module floats your boat, you can have a go at the software side too. As a hint, take a look on AliExpress for a much wider range of camera modules and lenses than the ones supplied with either of these boards.
This Polaroid is a lot of camera for ten quid!
If I’m exhorting readers to have a go with a shitty camera then, perhaps I should lead by example. Past entries of mine have come from that Agfa Rapid cartridge I mentioned, but for their current outing I’ve gone for a mixture of new and old. The new isn’t a hack, I just like those toy cameras with the thermal printers, but the old one has been quite a project. Older consumer grade Polaroid pack film instant cameras are particularly unloved, so I’ve 3D-printed a new back for mine that takes a 120 roll film. It’s an ungainly camera to take to the streets with, but now I’ve finished all that 3D printing I hope I’ll get those elusive dreamy black and white landscapes on my poll of FomaPan 100.
If you want to try the #ShittyCameraChallenge, hack together a shitty camera and get shooting. Its current iteration lasts until the 1st of February, so you should have some time left to post your best results on Mastodon. Good luck!

BlepFX Drops FREE Crunchrr Digital Degrader Plugin
On Monday, BlepFX released the free Crunchrr digital degrader plugin for macOS, Windows, and Linux. This VST3 and CLAP plugin has a simple interface that allows you to add digital artifacts to an audio source. Crunchrr modulates a small fractional delay line at an audio rate at high frequency, providing a bitcrush, erosion, and sample [...]
View post: BlepFX Drops FREE Crunchrr Digital Degrader Plugin

“I’m hoping that one day the passion will come back” Fatboy Slim says he “just don’t seem to feel like” making music anymoreRetirement may not be on the cards for Fatboy Slim just yet, but you’d be hard pressed to find the 61-year-old DJ and producer putting on his music-making hat ever again.
The musician, real name Norman Cook, recently told The Sun’s Bizarre column that he’ll much rather focus his energies on DJing than release new music because “you can’t make music unless you’re absolutely passionate about it”.

READ MORE: Behringer launches the Phara-o Mini, a synth inspired by “the mystical sounds of ancient Egypt”

“My last two singles just came out of a live show. They were both things that I made just to play on the side,” says Cook, who earlier this year released the single Bus Stop Please along with Daniel Steinberg.
“I had tunes that nobody else had in my set. And that kind of caught on with people when we worked out that we could clear the samples and release them. The thing is, you can’t make music unless you’re absolutely passionate about it and it drives you from the moment you wake up in the morning.”
“I just don’t seem to feel like that any more,” Cook admits. “I feel like that about DJing and about putting on things like this, but I’ve kind of lost my passion for making music.”
“For five years, I tried to beat myself up about it and go, ‘You should be doing this’. But then I thought, ‘Well, everybody likes my DJing and I enjoy that more, so I’ll do that.’”
“I’m hoping that one day the passion will come back,” he says.
Meanwhile, Fatboy Slim recently shared some DJing tips for the holidays, noting how it’s not so much about getting people dancing as much as it is about “unifying people”.
“The dance floor is like an organism, and when it’s all working together, it’s lovely, but sometimes you lose the dancefloor,” he said. “There’s sort of different pockets of people and they’re not really united. Or some people are dancing, some people aren’t, and it’s that feeling of bonding everybody together that you need to do, and recognition of a song that everybody likes is kind of that thing.”
“For me, if I really had to rescue a dance floor I’d play Right Here, Right Now or Praise You. They would be my get-out-of-jail records.”
The post “I’m hoping that one day the passion will come back” Fatboy Slim says he “just don’t seem to feel like” making music anymore appeared first on MusicTech.

Ewan Bristow Releases FREE EB-Diøne Creative Sampler for Audio Manipulation via Plugdata
On Friday, Ewan Bristow released the free EB-Diøne sampler, which is capable of some radical audio manipulation techniques.  As we’ve come to expect from Bristow’s work, EB-Diøne runs in the free Plugdata programming environment. You can run Plugdata on macOS, Windows, Linux, and more, either as a standalone app or plugin (VST3, LV2, CLAP, AU). [...]
View post: Ewan Bristow Releases FREE EB-Diøne Creative Sampler for Audio Manipulation via Plugdata

Mark Williamson: Trends driving the Music Business in 2025We asked a select group of our favorite pros to help identify the music business trends that will drive the industry in 2025. Mark Williamson, the founder and CEO of live music industry trade Rostr, offers four trends that he sees from his unique vantage point.
The post Mark Williamson: Trends driving the Music Business in 2025 appeared first on Hypebot.

Berklee Online offers free Ear Training Game in VRBerklee Online has launched a free training game in virtual reality, to making ear training more accessible, immersive and fun than ever before. Berklee Online offers free Ear Training Game. Continue reading
The post Berklee Online offers free Ear Training Game in VR appeared first on Hypebot.

SOS Podcast: Emulator II 40th Anniversary In episode 57 of our Electronic Music podcast, Rob Puricelli talks to Dave Rossum, Kevin Monahan and Paul...

AI data centers could be ‘distorting’ the US power gridThe proliferation of data centers aiming to meet the computational needs of AI could be bad news for the US power grid, according to a new report in Bloomberg. Using the 1 million residential sensors tracked by Whisker Labs, along with market intelligence data from DC Byte, Bloomberg found that more than half of the […]
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Beam me Up: Simple Free-Space Optical CommunicationLet’s think of the last time you sent data without wires. We’re not talking WiFi here, but plain optical signals. Free-space optical communication, or FSO, is an interesting and easy way to transmit signals through light beams. Forget expensive lasers or commercial-grade equipment; this video by [W1VLF] offers a simple and cheap entry point for anyone with a curiosity for DIY tech. Inspired by a video on weak signal sources for optical experiments, this project uses everyday components like a TV remote-control infrared LED and a photo diode. The goal is simply to establish optical communication across distances for under $10.
Click through the break to see more…
The heart of this setup is a basic pulse-width modulator driving the LED. Pair it with a photo diode for reception, and voilà—light beams become data carriers. Add a lens for focus, and you’ll instantly see the dramatic signal gain. LEDs from remote controls are surprisingly effective. For more precision, swap to narrow-beam LEDs or use filtered photo diodes to block ambient noise from sunlight or fluorescent lights. It’s delightfully simple yet endlessly tweakable.
[W1VLF]’s advice: start small, but don’t stop there—enthusiasts have built entire FSO networks to link rural areas! If you’re intrigued, [W1VLF] has more videos to explore. Want to dig deeper into the history of optical communications?  We’ve got that!  Once you advance, share your tips and thoughts in the comments below to help others get set up.

38C3: Xobs on Hardware DebuggersIf you just want to use a debugger for your microcontroller project, you buy some hardware device, download the relevant driver software, and fire up GDB. But if you want to make a hardware debugger yourself, you need to understand the various target chips’ debugging protocols, and then you’re deep in the weeds. But never fear, Sean [Xobs] Cross has been working on a hardware debugger and is here to share his learnings about the ARM, RISC-V, and JTAG debugging protocols with us.
He starts off with a list of everything you need the debugger hardware to be able to do: peek and poke memory, read and write to the CPU registers, and control the CPU’s execution state. With that simple list of goals, he then goes through how to do it for each of the target chip families. We especially liked [Xobs]’s treatment of the JTAG state machine, which looks pretty complicated on paper, but in the end, you only need to get it in and out of the shift-dr and shift-ir states.

This is a deep talk for sure, but if you’re ever in the throes of building a microcontroller programmer or debugger, it provides a much-appreciated roadmap to doing so.
And once you’ve got your hardware setup, maybe it’s time to dig into GDB? We’ve got you covered.

Karanyi Sounds releases Cloudmax Breeze, an AI-assisted vocal chain plugin (limited-time discount)
Over the last few months, we’ve seen many limited-time offers from Karanyi Sounds, including a massive 80% off Black Friday sale.  Now, they have released Cloudmax Breeze, an AI-assisted vocal chain plugin that is available at a limited-time discount. If you missed the Black Friday sale, it’s not too late for discounts; Karanyi Sounds still has over [...]
View post: Karanyi Sounds releases Cloudmax Breeze, an AI-assisted vocal chain plugin (limited-time discount)

Airwindows releases ConsoleX for macOS, Windows, and Linux
Chris Johnson, the man behind Airwindows, did his best Santa Claus impression this year by gifting us all ConsoleX on Christmas Day. Despite dropping on the typically hectic Christmas Day, I’m sure many of you immediately downloaded the highly-anticipated mixing console plugin and hid away in blissful ignorance of everything else the day brought. In [...]
View post: Airwindows releases ConsoleX for macOS, Windows, and Linux

Google CEO says AI model Gemini will the company’s ‘biggest focus’ in 2025CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly told Google employees that 2025 will be a “critical” year for the company. CNBC reports that it obtained audio from a December 18 strategy meeting where Pichai and other executives put on ugly holiday sweaters and laid out their priorities for the coming year. “I think 2025 will be critical,” Pichai […]
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DeFi has 3 options if IRS rule isn't rolled back — Alex ThornThe United States Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) received more than 44,000 comments after proposing the rule.

38C3: Towards an Open WiFi MAC Stack on ESP32At the 38th Chaos Communications Congress, [Frostie314159] and [Jasper Devreker] gave us a nice update on their project to write an open-source WiFi stack for the ESP32. If you’re interested in the ESP32 or WiFi in general, they’ve also got a nice deep dive into how that all works.
On the ESP32, there’s a radio, demodulator, and a media access controller (MAC) that takes care of the lowest-level, timing-critical bits of the WiFi protocol. The firmware that drives the MAC hardware is a licensed blob, and while the API or this blob is well documented — that’s how we all write software that uses WiFi after all — it’s limited in what it lets us do. If the MAC driver firmware were more flexible, we could do a lot more with the WiFi, from AirDrop clones to custom mesh modes.
The talk starts with [Jasper] detailing how he reverse engineered a lot of Espressif’s MAC firmware. It involved Ghidra, a Faraday cage, and a lucky find of the function names in the blob. [Frostie] then got to work writing the MAC driver that he calls Ferris-on-Air. Right now, it’s limited to normal old station mode, but it’s definite proof that this line of work can bear fruit.
This is clearly work in progress — they’ve only been at this for about a year now — but we’ll be keeping our eyes on it. The promise of the ESP32, and its related family of chips, being useful as a more general purpose WiFi hacking tool is huge.