Mark Wandel
sentex.net/~mwandel · Personal blog · on HN since 2008
Mathias Wandel is an engineer and hobbyist who documents home-built machines, camera hacks, LEGO projects, and small software tools on his personal site.
What HN saysHN commenters call him a favorite hacker and engineer, and link his flatbed scanner camera and teenage plotter and printer builds.
19HN people shared it
14linked it in comments
5stories submitted
70story points
3 months agolast shared
2008people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Flatbed scanner camera hack7 people · 28 points · first shared 2009 · 3 comments on HN
- 2Home built CD changer / duplicator2 people · 35 points · first shared 2008 · 2 comments on HN
- 3Organ2 people · first shared 2009
- 4Jhead2 people · first shared 2011
- 5Some LEGO machines1 people · 6 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 6Programmology1 people · 1 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 7Index1 people · first shared 2019
- 8C64scanner1 people · first shared 2019
- 9Plotter1 people · first shared 2019
- 10Scanner pix1 people · first shared 2009
- 11Printer1 people · first shared 2019
- 12Usage1 people · first shared 2010
- 13Homepage1 people · first shared 2010
- 14Joystik1 people · first shared 2019
What HN people wrote when they linked it
DarrisMackelroy · 2019-06-04
He's an extremely interesting person. He was a longtime engineer for RIM and he holds several GSM-related patents [1].
He's also written a few neat pieces of software, my favorite of which is Bigprint [2].
[1] https://patents.justia.com/inventor/matthias-wandel
[2] http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/index.html
pmarin · 2019-03-15
The author is one of my favorite hacker/ingeneer.
Mathias's projects when he was still in high school during the 80's:
Primitive plotter: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/plotter.html
Primitive 1-pin dot matrix printer:
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/printer.html
Primitive Commodore 64 drum scanner:
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/c64scanner.html
Home made wooden Joystik:
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/joystik.html
zorpner · 2014-10-13
Nice! Whenever I see rolling shutter photos on flickr/etc I always think about this old page where a fellow built a long-distance camera from a flatbed scanner to get the effect intentionally: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/scanner.html
(There's a great image of a garage door opening & closing about 2/3 of the way down the page if you don't feel like reading the whole thing.)
gxs · 2010-10-20
Hi, thanks to both of you for bringing this to my attention. I don't believe my account was dead, as my last comment received a reply.
It may have happened because initially when I edited the comment for a typo, it displayed duplicate comments after I hit update. So naturally, afterward I deleted one of them. My guess is I got caught by some spam filter or something.
For what it's worth, my original comment was just pointing people to Matthias Wandel's site: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/ where he actually has lots of cool projects. In particular I like the marble machines and his demo on how combination locks work.
JKCalhoun · 2025-08-23
Reminds me of the early experiments with using a flat-bed scanner as a digital back. Here is one: https://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/scanner.html
Terretta · 2016-09-01
Use 'jhead' and sync file timestamp to exif data:
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/
keenerd · 2012-10-15
If you want to play with real hardware, scrap a $100 scanner.
Simplest/oldest: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/scanner.html (The garage door picture continues to be awesome after so many years.)
More professional version: http://golembewski.awardspace.com/index.html (And weirdest - you really do not want to blink during one of these photos.)
AbnormalGun · 2011-02-07
Personally, I've always used Jhead for this. It is available for Unix and Windows, and I also use it to rename my photos.
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/
Dav3xor · 2010-10-20
Also, the requisite mention of the PIPE ORGAN he built.
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/organ/organ.html
jacquesm · 2009-08-26
wow... while you're at that site have a look at this:
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/organ/organ.html
An organ built almost completely out of wood.
zandorg · 2009-08-24
Cool shot of him working on Blackberry source code: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/scanner_pix.html
jcl · 2009-06-09
Some other scanning camera attempts:
http://golembewski.awardspace.com/cameras/current/index.html
http://home.comcast.net/~scancams/
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/scanner.html
4gotunameagain · 2026-08-18
icebraining · 2014-08-14