Thrift shops world wide have cabinets affected by outdated slide projectors and slide viewers, as clear slide know-how is totally out of date now. Don’t consider me? If you happen to handle to discover a movie developer in your space, ask them to make some slides for you and observe the look on their face. And since tens of millions upon tens of millions of slide viewers had been offered, they aren’t collectible or precious. Nonetheless, it will be a disgrace if all of them ended up in landfills, which is why Redditor ToBePacific transformed a classic slide viewer right into a usable show.
Commonplace client slide viewers had been very, quite simple units. A light-weight bulb would shine by way of the slide and a magnifying viewing lens would let the consumer see the enlarged picture. A flowery mannequin may need some sort of mechanism for flipping by way of a number of slides.
For this mission, ToBePacific was actually solely involved with the nifty-looking enclosure and the viewing lens from a Hanimex Vista Viewer II 35mm slide viewer. By placing a small LCD contained in the enclosure on the correct distance from the lens, the contents of the show would present up magnified. The magnification isn’t notably sturdy, however it does enlarge the show a bit and provides it a novel barely distorted look that has some classic appeal.
The LCD is 2”, however ToBePacific wasn’t pacific sufficient to specify particulars just like the mannequin or decision. A Raspberry Pi Zero 2W single-board laptop feeds video to that LCD and it will probably present all types of data. ToBePacific programmed a customized script that pulls information from a bunch of various publicly accessible APIs and shows it. Utilizing APIs from NASA, iNaturalist, and extra, it exhibits climate info, asteroid sightings, notable upcoming astronomical occasions, and even little bits of trivia.
The modified slide viewer isn’t obtrusive and appears a lot cooler than one thing like a Fb Portal, so ToBeSpecific can proudly place it on a desk or shelf and take a look each time he needs some info.
