Almost all hobbies require gear, but photography is among the most expensive. Even amateur photographers will spend thousands on camera bodies, lenses, and lighting. And that equipment tends to be beautiful, so throwing it away once it becomes obsolete would be a travesty. Petri Damstén, a photographer from Finland, had an old flash unit gathering dust. To give it new life, he converted that flash unit into a digital clock that is perfect for decorating a photography studio.
This looks like a typical flash unit, so it is at home among other outdated camera gear on a shelf. But instead of just looking pretty and evoking a sense of nostalgia, it performs a function: displaying the time. Where the flash unit’s diffuser panel was, there is now a small TFT LCD screen that shows the current time. Below the time, there are decorative dial markings like the kind you’d see on a camera lens. Below those, there are a few additional pieces of information: the current temperature in Celsius, the date, and a dot indicating if the temperature if plus or minus (red is positive, blue is negative).
The aesthetics are perfect, as they very closely mimic the style of camera settings screens. When placed atop a nice vintage Leica, the flash unit’s display looks like something created by a German design house.
To make this work, Damstén pulled the original electronic components out of the flash unit’s enclosure and replaced them with a Raspberry Pi Pico W development board and a 1.8” ST7735-based TFT LCD screen. Damstén chose the Pico W for its built-in WiFi adapter, which lets it stay updated with NTP (Network Time Protocol) and pull weather information from the internet. He programmed that functionality using Adafruit’s CircuitPython. Power comes from a USB cable hidden behind the camera.
Photographers tend to care a great deal about design and visuals, so this should appeal to anyone with a collection of old camera gear.
