Mathias Wandel is an engineer and hobbyist who documents home-built machines, camera hacks, LEGO projects, and small software tools on his personal site.
HN commenters call him a favorite hacker and engineer, and link his flatbed scanner camera and teenage plotter and printer builds.
Hi, thanks to both of you for bringing this to my attention. I don't believe my account was dead, as my last comment received a reply.
It may have happened because initially when I edited the comment for a typo, it displayed duplicate comments after I hit update. So naturally, afterward I deleted one of them. My guess is I got caught by some spam filter or something.
For what it's worth, my original comment was just pointing people to Matthias Wandel's site: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/ where he actually has lots of cool projects. In particular I like the marble machines and his demo on how combination locks work.
The author is one of my favorite hacker/ingeneer.
Mathias's projects when he was still in high school during the 80's:
Primitive plotter: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/plotter.html
Primitive 1-pin dot matrix printer:
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/printer.html
Primitive Commodore 64 drum scanner:
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/c64scanner.html
Home made wooden Joystik:
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/joystik.html
Nice! Whenever I see rolling shutter photos on flickr/etc I always think about this old page where a fellow built a long-distance camera from a flatbed scanner to get the effect intentionally: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/scanner.html
(There's a great image of a garage door opening & closing about 2/3 of the way down the page if you don't feel like reading the whole thing.)
If you want to play with real hardware, scrap a $100 scanner.
Simplest/oldest: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/scanner.html (The garage door picture continues to be awesome after so many years.)
More professional version: http://golembewski.awardspace.com/index.html (And weirdest - you really do not want to blink during one of these photos.)
He's an extremely interesting person. He was a longtime engineer for RIM and he holds several GSM-related patents [1].
He's also written a few neat pieces of software, my favorite of which is Bigprint [2].
[1] https://patents.justia.com/inventor/matthias-wandel
[2] http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/index.html
Some other scanning camera attempts:
http://golembewski.awardspace.com/cameras/current/index.html
http://home.comcast.net/~scancams/
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/scanner.html