alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Glitchy camera – a circuit-bent camera simulator in the browser
Fun little side project I built after learning about circuit bending in cameras for intentional glitch effect. It is browser based camera toy where you "rewire" CCD pin pairs, turn knobs to get different glitch artefacts in real time to capture as photos. I had fun learning to simulate different pin modes - channel split, hue/phase shifts, horizontal clock delays, colour kill etc.
Here are some photos taken: https://glitchycam.com/gallery
I intentionally leaned towards skeuomorphic design for nostalgia. I miss the days where I'd spend hours making a button to look like a physical button. Here I chose to make it look like a "good enough" Teenage Engineering device UI.
I tested/used GPT-5.3-Codex to build this from scratch, since there was a lot of hype around it on X. Maybe I wasn’t using it right, but I found it needed a lot of code cleanup at every step and a lot of hand holding along the way. It missed details/nuances and didn't land the skeuomorphic buttons or the interaction polish. It mostly helped with boilerplate where there wasn't much thinking/detailing. It did give a basic starting point for the effect calculations, but didn't really move the needle on the details.
Please give it a go and let me know what you think - your photos and video never leave your browser (you can download them if you choose to). Everything is processed locally in your browser (works offline), nothing is uploaded or seen by anyone.
Comments
Could've just name it Genius iLook 1321, lol. At least that was the experience for me when I tried to write a Linux driver for it. It was a pre-UVC camera, so that time I did all the glitches natively.
Had great fun with this today, thanks! Makes me think I'd love a compact hackable point'n'click glitch camera that you can load with glitch patches. Like a lomo and a guitar pedal had a baby.
I triggered the apple reactions and it added something fun: https://s.h4x.club/geuGjJgz
Really really really fun! Thanks for making it. :)
Nice! It’s the polish and attention to detail that really distinguishes this from something purely generated with AI. Getting the design details right shows the human touch.
This is super cool :) How did you do the circuit bending?
Is it emulating the CCD chip somehow, or approximating the effects?
Cool project. Love that it's entirely client-side — no uploads, no server processing. More browser tools should work this way.
Great job and thank you, I will be using this. I already love to use my phone camera, it's nice to have a glitch option.
That was exactly my experience with AI coding - useful for ideas and boiler plate code, but not much more.
It was fun to use glitchycam. Thank you for describing your journey with AI, that is similar what I am experiencing.
I love it. The aesthetics are fantastic. Can this record a video as well?
It looks very convincing, and funky. How does the simulation work?
I like that it is based on hardware fundamentals.
Love it! Bookmarked :-)
E: Nevermind, it's my university Fortiguard bullshit.
Anyone else getting certificate issue?
...Certificate issue was here
I just had gpt do a deep research on how to get started with physical circuit bending old digital cameras last night after seeing some fun tiktoks. Anyone know of any quick start resources/kits?
inspiration that I had me digging into this stuff: https://www.tiktok.com/@0xa.mp4