The Surprising Hackability Of A Knock-Off Chinese Toy Camera

My colleague Lewin on the other side of the world has recently bought himself a new camera. It’s a very cute little thing, a Kodak Charmera, the latest badge-engineered device to carry the venerable photography company’s name. It’s a keyring camera, not much bigger than my thumb, and packing a few-megapixel sensor and a little fixed-focus camera module. They’re all the rage and thus always sold out, so when I saw something similar on AliExpress for just under a tenner I was curious enough to drop in an order. How bad could it be?

A Blatant-Knock-Off With Interesting Internals

My G6 Thumb Camera arrived a few days later, as straightforward a copy of a branded product as I have seen, and while it’s by any measure not a high quality camera, I am pleasantly surprised how bad it isn’t. I’ve received a three megapixel camera with image and movie quality that’s far better than that of the kids toy cameras I’ve played with before at a similar price, and that’s something I find amazing. This isn’t a review of a cheap camera, instead it’s an investigation of what goes into a camera like this one. How can they make a camera that’s almost useful, for under a tenner?

If I were setting out to make this camera, I would reach for a microcontroller and one of the variety of cheap all-in-one camera modules on the market. You can buy just that for a similar price, the so-called ESP32-cam module, which pairs the Tensilica version of the microcontroller with a parallel-interface camera module. You can do all manner of hacks with an ESP32-cam and I have too, but unlike my knock-off Kodak it’s not quite fast enough for usable video. Plus, it doesn’t come with a battery and screen.

The little thumb camera is easy enough to crack open, and doing so reveals a small PCB with as expected a camera module dangling from it on a flexible PCB. It’s got a lens with an M8 mount which technically makes it an interchangeable lens camera, but we doubt anyone’s going to change lenses on this thing. Undoing a couple of screws, the board comes out along with the battery, speaker, and display connection, and on the reverse is the SoC, and a Flash memory chip. It’s an HX-Tech HX3302B, a dedicated IC for small cameras which appears in so many of these devices, but one which is sadly one of those Chinese chips for which almost no info can be found online. Oddly some of the best info comes from a familiar source, Sprite_TM has done a little hacking here and discovered that it has an openRISC 1000 core and the firmware is usually accessible, but beyond that no handy data sheets are to be had.

Just Good Enough To Be A Camera-As-A-Module

The focal plane focusing technique in action, in my digital Super 8 cartridge.
My camera then can be software-hacked, but not easily. If that were all then we’d be at the end of it, and I’d have merely another trinket. But there’s another reason I bought this thing, and that’s because I wanted a hardware hackable camera, not a software one. I want to use a small sensor like this behind all manner of custom lenses and mirrors in projects featuring repurposed 1970s snapshot cameras, and while I can and have used Raspberry Pi cameras and those ESP32s to do the job, that introduces annoying things like software and power systems to the equation. This camera has the germ of a digital camera as a module; I can take away the M8 lens and surround to replace it with my own optics, and in an instant I have a digital camera of my own without the hassle. Suddenly a just-good-enough novelty camera becomes rather interesting.

So my knock-off novelty integrates a package I would struggle to replicate for the price, and holds the promise of many creative camera hacks to come. I’ll probably follow the path I have with Pi cameras of fitting an M12 macro lens, and rear-focusing on the focal plane of a full-frame film camera for retro digital fun.

In the ten days or so since the work for this article started, the G6 Thumb Camera has been removed from AliExpress in Europe. You can still find it by switching your country to somewhere far-flung, but given that as you can see from the photos above it really is a blatant knock-off of the Kodak product it is hardly surprising that some lawyers have probably made a call. The good news is though that for hacking it doesn’t matter what the case says. I’ll be looking out for the inevitable follow-up, a thumb camera that’s not such a knock-off but which packs the same internals, and if you’re enjoying camera hacking, I suggest you do too.

The Graph Theory of Circuit Sculptures

Like many of us, [Tim]’s seen online videos of circuit sculptures containing illuminated LED filaments. Unlike most of us, however, he went a step further by using graph theory to design glowing structures made entirely of filaments.

The problem isn’t as straightforward as it might first appear: all the segments need to be illuminated, there should be as few powered junctions as possible, and to allow a single power supply voltage, all paths between powered junctions should have the same length. Ideally, all filaments would carry the same amount of current, but even if they don’t, the difference in brightness isn’t always noticeable. [Tim] found three ways to power these structures: direct current between fixed points, current supplied between alternating points so as to take different paths through the structure, and alternating current supplied between two fixed points (essentially, a glowing full-bridge rectifier).

To find workable structures, [Tim] represented circuits as directed graphs, with each junction being a vertex and each filament a directed edge, then developed filter criteria to find graphs corresponding to working circuits. In the case of power supplied from fixed points, the problem turned out to be equivalent to the edge-geodesic cover problem. Graphs that solve this problem are bipartite, which provided an effective filter criterion. The solutions this method found often had uneven brightness, so he also screened for circuits that could be decomposed into a set of paths that visit each edge exactly once – ensuring that each filament would receive the same current. He also found a set of conditions to identify circuits using rectifier-type alternating current driving, which you can see on the webpage he created to visualize the different possible structures.

We’ve seen some artistic illuminated circuit art before, some using LED filaments. This project doesn’t take exactly the same approach, but if you’re interested in more about graph theory and route planning, check out this article.

hackaday.com/2026/02/03/the-gr…

After 30 Years, Virtual Boy Gets its Chance to Shine

When looking back on classic gaming, there’s plenty of room for debate. What was the best Atari game? Which was the superior 16-bit console, the Genesis or the Super NES? Would the N64 have been more commercially successful if it had used CDs over cartridges? It goes on and on. Many of these questions are subjective, and have no definitive answer.

But even with so many opinions swirling around, there’s at least one point that anyone with even a passing knowledge of gaming history will agree with — the Virtual Boy is unquestionably the worst gaming system Nintendo ever produced. Which is what makes its return in 2026 all the more unexpected.

Released in Japan and North America in 1995, the Virtual Boy was touted as a revolution in gaming. It was the first mainstream consumer device capable of showing stereoscopic 3D imagery, powered by a 20 MHz 32-bit RISC CPU and a custom graphics processor developed by Nintendo to meet the unique challenges of rendering gameplay from two different perspectives simultaneously.

In many ways it’s the forebear of modern virtual reality (VR) headsets, but its high cost, small library of games, and the technical limitations of its unique display technology ultimately lead to it being pulled from shelves after less than a year on the market.

Now, 30 years after its disappointing debut, this groundbreaking system is getting a second chance. Later this month, Nintendo will be releasing a replica of the Virtual Boy into which players can insert their Switch or Switch 2 console. The device essentially works like Google Cardboard, and with the release of an official emulator, users will be able to play Virtual Boy games complete with the 3D effect the system was known for.

This is an exciting opportunity for those with an interest in classic gaming, as the relative rarity of the Virtual Boy has made it difficult to experience these games in the way they were meant to be played. It’s also reviving interest in this unique piece of hardware, and although we can’t turn back the clock on the financial failure of the Virtual Boy, perhaps a new generation can at least appreciate the engineering that made it possible.

Cutting Edge Technology

Looking at the Virtual Boy today, it’s easy to assume that it operates on more or less the same principles as modern VR headsets, with two independent displays used to show slightly different perspectives of the same scene to the player in order to trick their brain into seeing a three dimensional image. Indeed, that’s how it would be done today if you were to create a modern version of the Virtual Boy, and is essentially how the Switch version of the system will work.

That’s because today, thanks in large part to the demands of the smartphone market, we have access to miniature high-resolution displays. But the display technology of 1995 was very different, especially when it came to consumer devices. Released just five years prior, Sega’s Game Gear did feature a self-illuminated color display — but it was far too large and energy-hungry for this type of application.

The solution ended up coming from an American company, Reflection Technology. In the late 1980s they had developed a product called “The Private Eye”, a wearable monocle display that could connect to a standard computer. Utilizing the company’s patented Scanned Linear Array technology, it had a resolution of 720×280 and retailed for $795.

Reflection tried shopping the Scanned Linear Array technology around to other companies, including Sega, but were repeatedly turned down due to its cost and complexity. Eventually Gunpei Yokoi, head of Nintendo’s R&D and legendary creator of the Game Boy, came across the device and was impressed. He believed a scaled-down version of the technology could create a new type of gameplay experience that would be difficult for competitors to match, and so Nintendo entered into an exclusive licensing agreement for the Scanned Linear Array as it applied to gaming.

More than Meets the Eye

Contrary to our contemporary expectations, the Virtual Boy doesn’t have two screens. In fact, it doesn’t even have one. Instead, the Scanned Linear Array makes use of a single column of LEDs and a rapidly oscillating mirror to project an image into the user’s eye. By scanning back and forth across the eye fast enough, persistence of vision makes the viewer see a complete image.
From Patent 5003300A: “Head Mounted Display for Miniature Video Display System
The Private Eye used a single Scanned Linear Array element to create a 2D image in one eye, but the Virtual Boy featured two identical units to achieve its 3D effect. To bring the cost down, the resolution was dropped to 384×224, which corresponded to a column of 224 tiny LEDs for each eye. Recently The Slow Mo Guys on YouTube captured incredible footage of how the technology actually works inside the Virtual Boy, utilizing some clever video editing to demonstrate how each 1×244 LED array is able to draw out an entire frame of video.

youtube.com/embed/jW7M8H99x7Y?…

Monochromatic Miscalculation

As impressive as the Scanned Linear Array technology was, it had a critical flaw in that it could only produce an image in shades of red. While technically you could produce a full-color image via this method, it would require a red, green, and blue array for each eye, plus the necessary optics to combine their output.

By the time the Virtual Boy was being developed, blue LEDs were available but they were not yet common, and would have substantially raised the cost of the device. But even if this wasn’t the case, there was no way to fit all six LED arrays and the required optics into the Virtual Boy. As it was, the system was too heavy to wear like a modern VR headset, and needed to be held up to eye level with a tabletop stand. The power consumption would also have been prohibitive — even with just the two LED arrays, the system could only run for approximately four hours on six AA batteries.

Despite these challenges, Nintendo reportedly did experiment with versions of the Virtual Boy that could display more colors. But in the end, just like The Private Eye that came before it, the console was only capable of a red-on-black color scheme that users found unpleasant to view for extended periods of time. As if that wasn’t bad enough for a game system, many players experienced eyestrain from the 3D imagery, and even Nintendo’s own advertisements claimed children under the age of seven shouldn’t use the system due to the potential for eye damage.

The Modern Solution

While the Switch support for Virtual Boy games will at least mean these titles get to be played by a larger audience, there’s something bittersweet about how it will work. The Virtual Boy accessory for the Switch is nothing but a hollow plastic shell with a slot for the player to insert their Switch, and for those that don’t want to spend $99, Nintendo says there’ll even be a cardboard version that accomplishes the same goal. Like Google’s phone-based VR offering, all you really need is to hold a couple of lenses and partition off each eye.

All the heavy lifting will be done in software, with the two perspectives on gameplay being displayed in a split-screen fashion. A simple and easy to implement approach that takes advantage of the Switch’s modern high-resolution widescreen display and processing power.

It’s a logical solution to a problem which once took hundreds of dollars worth of custom hardware to solve, and will undoubtedly work even better than the original version. This is especially true since Nintendo has said they plan on adding support for rendering the games in colors other than red.

Still, it won’t be nearly as impressive as the engineering that went into the Virtual Boy itself. So if you find yourself playing Mario Tennis or Galactic Pinball through the literal rose-tinted glasses of the Switch’s upcoming accessory, take a moment to appreciate all the incredible work that went into developing the hardware capable of rendering them thirty years ago.

hackaday.com/2026/02/03/after-…