One of the most interesting things about hacking is the difference between the vision we have at the beginning and the reality of we’ve built at the end. What began as a simple plan to build a night vision VR headset turned into a five-month adventure for [facelessloser] that culminated in this great-looking camera. He thought it would be easy, but almost every aspect presented some kind of challenge. The important thing is that he kept at it.
One of the major issues [facelessloser] encountered was power. He found that the Pi (Zero W), the screen, and the IR LEDs draw between 1.5 and 2A altogether. He was able to solve this one by using the charging board from a 2A power bank paired with a 1200mAh Li-Po built for the high draw required by vaping. If not for space issues, he might have used a 18650 or two.
Another challenge he faced was storing the video and images. He’d considered setting up the Pi as an access point to view them from a phone browser, but ultimately extended a USB port with an OTG cable to use flash drives. With a bit of Python he can watch for the drive to mount and then write to it. If the flash drive suddenly disappears, the Pi starts saving to the SD card.
There are two videos after the break, a walk through and a night vision demo. You’ll see a bit of a lag happening in the demo video—that’s because [facelessloser] is running the feed through PyGame first. No matter what nightlife you want to peep, it might be nice to add automated zoom with a rangefinder or get a closer look with some PiNoculars.
We’ve also seen other interesting night vision projects here on Hackaday such as this:
https://hackaday.io/project/10579-retro-futuristic-automobile-control-panel/log/44448-assistive-technologies-lets-improve-night-time-driving
https://hackaday.io/project/10579-retro-futuristic-automobile-control-panel/log/45561-assistive-technologies-building-cheap-night-time-vision-goggles
And many others- accessibke if we hit the search button.
Wow, what interesting projects- and such a helpful suggestion about how to search the hackaday.io site. I guess shameless self-promotion is better than none at all…
Dylan Thomas inspired title. Nice.
‘great looking’ is used in a flexible manner I guess.
It’s in an enclosure at least, but those buttons are cheap and tawdry IMHO.
I realized a while after my comment that it it looks extremely like a fidget cube in the present form. Those assorted buttons.
I think it looks cool :)
Needs some light-up fighter jet style toggle switches, eh?
Do you plan to incorporate this into an economically feasible monocular chassis? What is your intended use of the item?