November: Vibration sensor
It’s useful for more than this machine, so I posted about ShakeFinder separately. It turned out really cool. This was the missing piece for fully automating the capture process at a fire-and-forget level where I could just sit next to it while doing something else.
December-April: Vibration sensor video 
That took forever! To be fair, there was a lot of real-life getting in the way, too, but polishing something up for public release takes so much longer than just making it for yourself.
One of my other hobbies is making explainer-type videos about little projects I’ve worked on (once every year or two) and this seemed like a nice opportunity to make a fun video about a simple circuit. In hindsight, had I known it was going to take this long, I might have reconsidered. Still, I’m happy with how it turned out.
What’s Next
I’ve already added the “did you detect shaking since the last time I asked” and “wait until there hasn’t been any shaking for X ms” primitives to my Arduino code, but the desktop app doesn’t use either of them yet. It won’t be hard to get that integrated with the capture code though.
Beyond that I need to, like, remember what I was doing last year before all of this. 
While I haven’t hit all of my research goals (I still want to revisit Köhler lighting and do some side-by-side comparisons vs. the integrating sphere now that I’ve got everything else up and running), I’m afraid this early prototyping phase has lasted longer than the year I set out for it.
That said, the results I’m already seeing are better than I expected. So I think I’m going to try to beeline for getting the software in shape enough to do a first round of captures on these 39 family reels. I’ve been promising these transfers to some of my family members for a while and I’d like to fulfill them in at least a semi-timely fashion.