Open Camera

Colorado's wildlife underpass along Interstate 70 is working, with cameras showing a range of animals using the crossing to safely pass beneath the busy highway. The structure is designed to reduce collisions between vehicles and wildlife while keeping migration routes open. Footage of the animals passing through is drawing wide attention as evidence that the investment is paying off.

An engineer has documented the reverse-engineering of the AMT630A, the cheap display chip inside widely sold $35 backup camera screens, publishing the work on GitHub. The project explains how to understand and reuse the low-cost hardware beyond its original purpose. Readers are discussing the ingenuity of cracking open bargain-priced electronics and what the chip's documented details could enable for hobbyist projects and reuse.

OpenArm 2.0 has been introduced as an open-source 7-degree-of-freedom robot arm built with quasi-direct drive joints, bilateral force feedback, and an in-hand camera. By publishing the design openly, the project aims to give researchers and hobbyists affordable access to dexterous manipulation hardware, with early coverage highlighting the combination of force sensing and integrated vision as notable for a DIY-friendly platform.

An amateur astronomer has published a new astrophotograph of NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula, together with the open cluster M52 in Cassiopeia. The image was taken in HOO bicolor from 240 exposures of 60 seconds each in hydrogen-alpha and oxygen-III, using a SkyWatcher 254/1000 telescope, QHY163M camera and EQ6-R Pro mount with guiding. Astronomy communities are sharing the result as an example of what dedicated home equipment can capture.