About

My name is Dan, I’m a mechatronics engineer in Mexico with an interest in making affordable solutions for fellow makers/creators worldwide!

Back in the early 2000’s my first introduction to photography (like most kids at the time) was trough a cheap point and shoot film camera, and although not much can be learned apart from composition and making every shot count, it was still a great first experience.
Soon after my attention diverted to video with my first handycam, but as the years went by I eventually came back to photography, only now with a digital camera. This is were I learned the basics of photography: aperture, shutter speeds, rule of thirds and so on.

Fast forward to mid-2010’s and I decided to get back into film again, only this time with an SLR that would allow me to use all the acquired knowledge from digital.
The slow process was very refreshing and that old feeling of making each shot count was fantastic in a weird way. From that moment on I always had some spare film and the SLR on hand for those special moments were a smartphone camera just doesn’t cut it.

Fast forward again to the current decade: Film labs became more scarce and it was harder to get good scans in my area, so I decided to dive deep into home developing and scanning. The process is simple enough that anyone can do it, but it can get boring and monotonous after doing it more than a few times.

Naturally I decided to look around for more automated machines and to my surprise there were basically no reasonable solutions for the amateur film photographer to develop at home.
Every product out there had it’s limitations and compromises, nothing ticked all the boxes: either too expensive or too big, no temperature control, or not even a finished product (arduino prototypes/projects).

This is when I realized a gap in the market had been created: first by the virtual extinction of the 1-hour photo lab and second, the rise of film prices meant that not everyone was willing to spend extra to ship and develop their rolls out of town.
So I decided to tackle this problem with the idea of creating a fully functional product and only going public once I was certain it would work… 30 months after starting this journey with dozens of iterations, dozens of test rolls developed (with the occasional failures in between), and with the help of a few volunteer testers recently, the Darkroom Helper is finally available.

There’s still a few minor improvements to come, like more memory, maybe updated UI, but by and large this is exactly the type of machine I would’ve bought three years ago when I first got into DIY film developing.
For this reason alone I consider it a personal success, but now it’s time to make it available for other photographers out there so that we can all contribute to keeping film relevant for many years to come!

Dan M

PS There’s always more exciting projects, updates and products coming! so make sure to follow me on my social media channels if you don’t want to miss out.