I turned my iPhone and a $20 smart plug into an f-stop timer

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External ID

49978595

Source

HN

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Product

I turned my iPhone and a $20 smart plug into an f-stop timer

Website domain

peterszentkiralyi.eu

Launched

Oct. 6, 2026

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Upvotes

84

Upvotes percentile

0.8872180451127819

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Fetched at

Oct. 8, 2026, 5:02 p.m.

Updated at

Oct. 8, 2026, 5:02 p.m.

Description

I am a film photographer and do some darkroom printing and always wanted one of the proper, advanced f-stop timers, but never really wanted to spend a couple hundred dollars on one. Eventually I figured my phone was already perfectly capable of doing the timing, it just needed a way to switch the enlarger.So I built Darkplug around a cheap smart plug. The app controls the enlarger over the local network and does regular timing, f-stop timing, test strips, has an intuitive dodge/burn workflow, split grade (2 timing channels) and paper development timing.I’ve been using it for a few months in my improvised bathroom darkroom.Fair warning: the app was blindly vibe coded using Codex and Xcode.

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