DIY Powershot A640 bend

DIY Powershot A640 bend

Got a FZ10 from u/NOYSTOISE a bit more than a month ago.

It's my first time experimenting with a circuit bent camera and it's been a blast. I've had film cameras in the past but after about a decade of inactivity, it feels nice to get back into the hobby!

Here's my first photo dump using said camera. For some reason it jibes really well with salmon pink which is my favorite colour, almost all my favorite shots have some of it.

Hope you enjoy the pictures, constructive criticism is welcome! Good day

I’m a scorpion keeper, and I recently completed my first circuit-bent toy cameras. So here are some glitch photos of one of my scorpions (Androctonus australis). :)

My Canon A520 build is finally complete, using what I believe to be the best combination of ADC colour bends from this body.

I am also launching a store soon which will have more copies of this build and eventually more complex designs.

I'll be shipping for free within Canada at what I think is a very reasonable price ($400 CAD), which includes batteries, SD card & colour matched wrist strap.

Shoot me a DM if you want to pre-claim one of the colours from the first drop (Grey Smoke livery is unavailable since it's for a future A540 build).

Check out my new IG as well @artifact_labs

Hello camera benders far and wide!! I’m super stoked to present a bend I’ve been working on the last couple months for my A520. It expands on traditional camera bending techniques through the use of digital logic. This is my second camera bend and I ended up throwing in more features than I originally planned. It took a lot of experimentation and troubleshooting to get everything behaving as intended, but I think it was worth the effort and I'm really happy with the final result.

Firstly, I'd like to thank u/NOYSTOISE who first implemented logic based bending and was incredibly helpful in explaining how it works. He's also one of the pioneers of camera bending imo. His Super-Mod bend heavily inspired this project. Hopefully this comes across as an extension of his ideas rather than derivative.

I’ve included a bend circuit diagram for anyone curious how i implemented this. I tried to make it readable, but feel free to ask any questions.

Bellow I will detail the features and the build process for anyone interested.

Features

• 10 position DIP switch source selector (ADC data out
D11-D2)

• Hard shorts or variable high-pass filtering

• Invert function

• Division function

• 9 position switch target selector (ADC data out
D11-D4, GND)

Bend description

This bend allows for hard shorts when multiple switches on the same bank are enabled. Variable filtering of the source data is achieved through a pot controlled, high-pass filter between the source and target pins, when both switch banks are enabled.

There are two large switches on the side that select either bypass, invert or divide for the source data. These functions also stack with the variable filter. The chips are powered directly from the 3.3 V digital supply in the camera.

The invert function, as the name implies, inverts the source data (sends HI -> LO and LO -> HI) before it is mixed into the target data. The result is a colour negative effect, where bright areas become dark and vice versa. This function uses a NAND gate chip with the inputs connected (logical NOT). I used a SN74HC00, although a single channel gate would be more space/power efficient, this is what I had on hand. It's also annoying to tie all the unused channel inputs to ground to avoid excess power draw.

The division function reduces the frequency of the source pin data by two, before mixing it with the target pin. This only works when at least some of the selected source and target pins are the same (e.g. source: D11 / 2 + D10 / 2 -> target: D11 + D10, etc). This is achieved using a D-type flip-flop configured as a divide by two circuit. I used a CD54HC74 for this. It produces highly chaotic shifting scan lines, reminiscent of extreme pixel sorting. Interestingly, the number of scan lines that appear can be adjusted via the pot, and the number of source and target pins that are active. This effect works best in video and is hard to capture in photo, unless a really high shutter speed it used.

Build process

I designed and 3D printed a bend box to house all of the wires, switches and electronic components. This was inspired from builds i’ve seen from u/ElonMuscular_420 and u/Critical_Onion_8593. The box has a lid however that can be taken off to service the components inside.

Only one print was required, as i modelled the individual components (switches, pots, circuit board etc.) and test fit them all together in an assembly model.

The box was printed in two parts, the housing which contains the main circuit board with its standoffs (this keeps the board raised to the level of the lid), switches and pots. I chose to do this so it would be easy to access for any repairs or changes in the future.

The box itself contains three holes for two large switches and pot. The lid was designed with empty space to accomodate recessed source and target switch banks. The vertical clearance in the housing was such that i could fit the main circuit board, standoffs and chips without anything touching and where everything was fixed and wouldn’t move around. I printed gaps in the corners where the screws go, so I can insert nuts to keep the screws fixed. This is because a tapped thread in plastic will quickly degrade after a few screw cycles. This seemed like the simplest option at the time.

In order to fix the box to the camera body, i identified an empty space near the flash capacitor and measured the exact point where i could drill through the camera shell and bend box to affix a screw between them. To ensure that the box didn’t move around or come loose, i used two compound glue between the box and the camera shell. I did a slight touch up with supa glue on some of the empty gaps. The result is a strong and stable extended housing for all of the electronics.

The main circuit board contains all the connections. I made it using protoboard, which i cut to size to fit within the housing. The wiring up process was definitely the most painful part of this build, which could definitely be avoided if using a custom printed circuit board, which i’m considering for future projects.

If anyone is interested in doing something similar, feel free to reach out and I can send you the CAD files.

The finish

For the finish I was inspired by the paint jobs i’ve seen from u/uglatto_, u/gork_online, u/ElonMuscular_420 and u/Critical_Onion_8593. I wanted to do something unique but i’ve never spray painted intricate things or really anything before, so I did mess it up a bit, which you can see if you zoom in haha. Still turned out pretty nice but there’s a few things I would have done differently.

I started by coating everything red because this was the colour of my 3D print filament. This was probably not necessary in hindsight. I also used the cheapest paint i could find and did not use primer. This meant i had to do multiple coats to cover everything. Stupidest idea ever. It’s definitely worth paying a bit extra for quality paint and primer. It did not adhere well to the shell, so i don’t anticipate it will hold up great over time.

The swirly paint was from a technique called hydrodipping and this was super fun and easy actually. I just followed a youtube tutorial. This was the highlight for me overall in the build process. There was something magical about pulling the shell out of the water bucket with all the swirls on it. Just make sure you have gloves or mineral turpentine handy to get all the shit off your hands when you’re done. I learnt this the hard way haha. Overall I’m happy with how it looks and definitely recommend trying this technique out.

Future work

There’s a few things i would do differently overall in my next project. I treated this as a prototype to be optimised later in future bends. The soldering process took ages as I had to solder many many tiny wires (~70-80) to the camera and circuit board. I also used magnet wire, so every end needs to be prepped before soldering. Probably going to look into custom PCBs, which should decrease the soldering time significantly.

I’d also like to experiment with additional logic functions beyond inversion and division. Another interesting avenue to investigate would be implementing logic with CCD clock signals.

Overall, this project pushed my bending skills to the limit and it is a far cry above my first build. Seeing that first bent live view come through after ages of experimentation made all the pain worth it though.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, any ideas for future bends, or suggestions for improving the design.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I hope you found this as interesting as i did! Happy bending!!

Cheers,

Topsail

Just a collection of pictures I meant to share earlier, but ended up amassing over weeks. Took this baby on hikes, to monuments, and even took some behind the scenes photos of the short film we just shot last weekend!

My two toy cameras. I can’t wait to try a real circuit-bent camera… (I’m still waiting to find one, and I’m still a bit scared of the flash capacitor because I got a pretty nasty shock once. Back then, I didn’t know anything about cameras - I just wanted to see what was inside…)