There oughta be…

…a blog with awesome projects. A collection of overcomplicated devices nobody needs. A sanctum for all the things that did not get living room clearance, but oughta be seen by fellow nerds.

There oughta be a Game Boy Slideshow

10 January 2025

What is the easiest way to create a ROM with a slideshow of your own images for your Game Boy? How about opening a website, dragging your images into the site and hitting a generate button? That’s it. That’s what I created here.

Check out this rather short Youtube video to see the tool in action or just look at the top of this post to try it out yourself.

There oughta be a Bluetooth Remote app for Sony cameras.

07 December 2024

Do you own a Sony camera? Then you probably know the pain of trying to use a phone to remotely trigger the camera. I gave up on using Wifi and the official Play Memories app for that. …or Imaging Edge or whatever it is called now. For quite a while I have been carrying a primitive IR remote, when I learned that my α6400 actually can be controlled via Bluetooth. So, I created the app that I wished Sony would provide. Of course it’s free and open source.

The video is mostly about my process of going through all the options to remotely trigger my camera and, yes, I took this as an excuse to create my first “Top 5” listicle. It is a good starting point if you want to know what problem this app solves and if it is for you. This article here will go into more detail of how the app works, how to control the camera via Python, what the app can do, what it cannot do and how to automate the app from other apps like Tasker.

There oughta be a 37c3 talk and music

30 December 2023

Just a quick update on two things that happened recently without being a new projekt:

• I gave a talk at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress about how the GB Interceptor can reconstruct the Game Boy’s screen content by listening in on the memory bus. The recording is available at media.ccc.de.

• Because some asked for the music from my recent video about the wooden Game Boy (some as in a handful, I am not under the delusion that the world was waiting for my video soundtrack) I have uploaded it as a pure mp3 as well as making it available on common streaming services. You can find more details on there.oughta.be/music.

There oughta be a wooden Game Boy.

03 November 2023

You made me create a wooden Game Boy shell. Yes, you made me do it. After I got myself a CNC machine a while back I just made a wooden Game Boy cartridge to get to know the machine, but social media wanted more. So, I made a Game Boy out of walnut wood.

You can see the process in the video without much explanation. If you want to learn about the toolpaths, my reasoning behind a few things, lessons learned and what you should avoid if you try this yourself, read this blog post instead and check out my design files on GitHub.

There oughta be a bullet time video booth.

26 May 2023

For my cousin’s wedding I did not make a photo booth but a video booth. - With an array of DSLRs to create a bullet time effect.

Since this is a very visual project, you should really watch the video. This blog post contains the same info with more details, but those details are probably only relevant if you really want to recreate this project, which is not an easy thing to do.