Kodak Pi Notification Lamp

Another mashup of retro and modern tech, this voice-activated Kodak lamp uses a Pi Zero W and Unicorn HAT.

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This month, we’ve highlighted a new project from Martin Mander, which is a little less complicated but no less classy than his 1986 Google Pi Intercom. This time another retro sale snagged Martin a 1930s Kodak table viewer that he’s adapted to display notifications and alerts using a range of LED colours on a Unicorn pHAT (from Pimoroni, see https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/unicorn-phat). The pHAT has a programmable matrix of bright LEDs and this is controlled by a Raspberry Pi Zero W, which checks for incoming Gmail instructions using a simple Python script.

Where did this idea come from?

I picked up this Kodak slide/negative viewer at a sale recently for £10. Normally I do a bit of research before tearing a piece apart, just for curiosity and to get a feel for its original function, but I didn’t get very far! Having trawled Google images and old photography catalogues, the only similar model I came across was an eBay listing, asking around £600 for the viewer. I have no idea if that’s a fair price or not but decided for this project that I’d attempt a non-destructive conversion. This turned out to be a smart plan as the viewer is made exclusively of glass and metal, so any hacking around would have risked ruining an irreplaceable component. I decided to stay fairly true to its original function and replace the light source with a modern LED array, hoping this would be bright enough to glow nicely and project at least some light through the viewer lens onto a wall.