Arduino: New Product and New DSLR Project
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Arduino Opta is a micro PLC for industrial IoT applications - CNX Software
Arduino has recently announced the Opta micro PLC with industrial IoT capabilities adding yet another solution to the Arduino Pro family.
Arduino used to focus on the hobbyist crowd, but with the launch of the Arduino Pro family in 2020 starting with the Portenta H7 board, the company switched its main focus to the more profitable enterprise market. Since then they’ve launched several other boards designed in-house, and last year started collaborating with the introduction of the Arduino WisGate Edge LoRaWAN gateways based on RAKwireless hardware. The Arduino Opta is another one of those collaborations as it was designed together with Finder, who calls their devices PLR (Programmable Logic Relays).
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Digitize your old slides with a modern DSLR camera | Arduino Blog
Until the proliferation of digital photography, film slides were a common way to share photos. After a nice vacation in the ‘70s, you might take your film rolls for development and would have the option to receive a set of slides. You could then gather all of your friends in your living room, pop those slides into a projector carousel, and force everyone to look at unfocused pictures of palm trees projected onto the wall. If you still have a collection of slides (or inherited your parents’ collection), this video from Scott Lawrence demonstrates one method for converting them to digital photos.
This approach might seem rudimentary, but it is quite effective. If you look at it from a high level, it is essentially just snapping photos of the slides with a modern DSLR camera. But those cameras are capable of capturing very high-quality pictures and this process is easy to automate. The key to that automation is the use of a vintage slide carousel. They are affordable and easy to control with a microcontroller, which makes them perfect for this application.