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.
I wanted a camera that doesn't exist, so I built it
131–140 of 145 posts
Re: I wanted a camera that doesn't exist, so I built it
#132Very 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!
Re: I wanted a camera that doesn't exist, so I built it
#133> 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 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.
Re: I wanted a camera that doesn't exist, so I built it
#134This 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 a…
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.
Re: I wanted a camera that doesn't exist, so I built it
#135> 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 :)
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 imp…
> 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.
Re: I wanted a camera that doesn't exist, so I built it
#136> 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.
Re: I wanted a camera that doesn't exist, so I built it
#137It'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.
Re: I wanted a camera that doesn't exist, so I built it
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
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…
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).
Re: I wanted a camera that doesn't exist, so I built it
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Bigger lenses tend to gather more light and that means better images in darker moments.
Re: I wanted a camera that doesn't exist, so I built it
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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...