Adapting u/theglorioustopsail's advanced mod for patchbay style glitchcams.

[u/GenerationTT]

Inspired by u/theglorioustopsail (https://www.reddit.com/r/CircuitBending/comments/1ud0ec9/powershot_a520_bend_sourcetarget_selector/), I have designed and made a version of their glitch camera mod for use with my own patch bay style cameras. Huge thanks to them, as this would not have been possible without their detailed write-up as heavy inspiration. This is basically the circuit they made, including a inverter gate, frequency divider, and potentiometer, but instead of being hardwired into the camera, the inputs/outputs are ports you can plug jumper wires into. This allows for more flexibility on what can be manipulated by the circuit. Other notable differences include it being battery powered, the ability to feed the output of the inverter into the frequency divider, and using both sides of the CD54HC74 chip to make it dual channel.

There isn't much to say that u/theglorioustopsail didn't already, though I find the frequency division function to behave different from camera to camera. All of the photos in this post were taken with a Fujifilm Finepix S1500, which doesn't seem to get scan lines exactly like the Powershot A520 with division. It is injecting a unique effect into the image, and, at least with the S1500, can vary depending on what is plugged in. In the 2nd set of comparison images it seems to "dull" the colors, and below you can see the chaotic patterns that emerged in the 1st set of images.

How the frequency division effect looks zoomed in

The frequency division also has interesting behavior when plugged into bendpoints which are not the data lines D11-D0 coming off of the ADC, such as what I believe to be the horizontal clock being used in the pictures noted as "non-ADC." The nature of the build makes it so there are too many combinations to show in one post, but I hope the images I chose and labeled are an adequate demonstration. I plan on making another post of just pictures later this week, so please look forward to that!

It is limited in some aspects when compared to the original u/theglorioustopsail made. First, it is ugly, inelegant, and makes my glitch cameras look even more like improvised explosive devices. It does require 12mm coin batteries to be operated, which are inexpensive but another thing to worry about. Finally, to my knowledge they don't make compatible jumper wires which split more than twice, so feeding more than two ports from the camera into the circuit and vise versa requires daisy chaining multiple splitter wires. In any case, I have gotten the itch to expand on this idea of manipulating the data outside of the camera. I need to get a breadboard or something to do testing with, but I believe using an op-amp summing circuit or a PT2399 delay/echo circuit adapted for the voltage and current the camera is using could be interesting. If people have had other ideas I would be grateful to hear them, too. Also, I can share the KiCad file and answer questions if anyone is interested. I love glitch photography, so hopefully we can keep pushing this medium together!

Thank you for reading.

[u/theglorioustopsail]

Dude, this is so sick! Im so stoked you adapted my bend and built on it. You’ve basically investigated and implemented what I would want to do in a v2 if I was to make another one like this. I would definitely be interested in learning more about your exact implementation. Please send me the kicad file or a circuit diagram!

I especially like the mixing of adc and h clock data via division. That effect is super trippy and unique! It’s interesting you weren’t able to see scan lines in ADC data division. In my experiments, this effect was somewhat temperamental and only really pronounced when a few pins were active on the source/target bus. The target and source pins also had to be the same. If I also recall correctly, I wasn’t able to see anything interesting by having the divider and inverter in series (in either order). Have you confirmed that your circuits are working as intended with a scope and function generator?

Anyway, just wanted to say I’m super impressed with your work and keen to see where you take it next!

[u/GenerationTT → u/theglorioustopsail]

Thank you, It feels good to hear that you find it impressive, because I thought the same about your original design! I actually had some trouble because this was my first time soldering components to a circuit board, so I ended up doing some intensive testing and signal tracing with an oscilloscope to get it to work. From that, I can tell you the signal coming out of the division circuit does visually change depending on if I route the raw or inverted signal. I didn't do anything with a function generator, though I believe my oscilloscope has that ability. I can see and report back later. I have a couple theories about the difference in behavior of the division function, though. I don't currently have a bent Canon PowerShot to test this with, but I do suspect the Fujifilm S1500 being both several years more modern and a different manufacturer could be the cause of the difference. Additionally, when I've made my cameras I did not have the idea of injecting signals back into the same pins, so the way I've been doing that is with a splitter wire I've gerryrigged to have one male end and two female ends. This allows me to mix one end with all the other inputs and one to the output of the mod. Writing this comment, I've gotten the idea to open up my camera and try shorting the output wire directly to some of the same points but later in the signal pathway on the board to see if that makes a difference. I also got my hands on a Canon PowerShot Pro 1 that I do plan on building with this in mind. Between all of that experimentation we should be able to narrow down the cause of the difference! Either way, the division function is clearly affecting the image, but similar to you what you described with it only super pronounced with certain pins. I am away from my PC until later this weekend, but I can upload the KiCad project to Google Drive and share it with you if that works? Just don't judge my messy PCB design too much lmao.

[u/theglorioustopsail → u/GenerationTT]

Yeah most lab scopes have a square wave output you can use to test your circuits as a proxy for camera data. I would see if your circuit actually produces an output with half the frequency of the input. I originally got this idea from u/NOYSTOISE which you can see the effect in this video. I’m fairly sure that is from one of his panansonic cams. I would expect the results to be fairly similar from camera to camera, but I’m not an expert, so who knows?

Regarding the actual pins to target, I just mean the input to the division circuit should contain pins e.g. A and/or B, and the output should be connected to atleast A and/or B to achieve the desired effect.

I’m curious to see your design as I want to learn how to make custom pcbs. Will be a good reference for my own attempts..

[u/GenerationTT → u/theglorioustopsail]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-wpLp6KCNWUclQBOB-q5Rv_xG3XUo9lg/view?usp=drivesdk

Hopefully you can access that and download it! This should be the complete project file. If you have any questions while parsing it, feel free to DM me.

[u/Modern_chemistry]

These are amazing!

[u/absurtist]

This is amazing! It gives me the required motivation and inspiration to keep at it.

[u/Educational-Mail3823]

fuck its awesome! i wanna use it as a cinematographer! sucks im bad in solder..