Everyone’s done it by now so it’s not cool anymore, but I now have my very own hacked CVS digital camera. For those living under a rock, CVS sells one-time-use digital cameras for $20, and video cameras for $30. The idea is you are supposed to return the camera, pay them to develop it, and they keep the camera. The only advantages of the still camera over a disposable film camera are that you can preview and delete photos after you take them and presumably you get a digital copy of the prints. So, the only thing to do is hack the cam so you can get the pictures off yourself and keep it for good.
Of course, it didn’t take long for every hacker with a logic analyzer to reverse engineer these things, so I didn’t have to do any trailblazing for the hack. I just built a cable using a USB cable (from an old digicam) and my old Palm III cradle. Then I loaded a patched firmware, a rather involved process that requires opening the camera and shorting a couple of pins on its PCB as it boots up.
Does it take good pictures? It is decent, but nothing to write home about. It has just over a megapixel CCD and a really bright flash. It is focused like your usual point & shoot, so anything closer than a couple of feet will be blurry. Still, it may make a worthy camera for some aerial photography experiments later on, and a good camera to carry places where the normal digicam might get broken or stolen. Here’s a picture of the cable taken with the camera.
(This entry tests the flickr “Blog This” button. If you read this, it worked.)