Play-by-play Of A High Altitude Balloon Flight

August 9, 2011 by 16 Comments

[Greg Intermaggio] and [Shumit DasGupta] at Techsplosion launched a high altitude balloon last week that climbed to 90,000 feet above sea level somewhere over California. The play-by-play of the flight is one of the better stories we’ve seen on high altitude balloon builds.

The balloon, christened VGER-1, carried a SPOT satellite GPS messanger to send telemetry back to the ground. We’ve seen a few home brew balloon tracking devices, but [Greg] decided to use an off-the-shelf solution for the sake of simplicity. Like other balloons the VGER-1 carried a CanonPowershot camera with CHDK firmware.

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DIY Book Scanner Processes 600 Pages/hour

July 18, 2011 by 39 Comments

Like any learned individual, [Justin] has a whole mess of books. Not being tied to the dead-tree format of bound paper, and with e-readers popping up everywhere, he decided to build a low-cost book scanner so an entire library can be carried in a his pocket. If that’s not enough, there’s also a complementary book image processor to assemble the individual pictures into a paginated tome.

The build is pretty simple – just a little bit of black craft board for the camera mount and adjustable book cradle. [Justin] ended up using the CHDK software for the Cannon PowerShot camera to hack in a remote trigger. The scanner can manage to photograph 600 pages an hour, although that would massively increase if he ever moves up to a 2-camera setup.

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A Simple Dolly For Time-Lapse Photography

July 3, 2011 by 22 Comments

[Henrique] wrote in to tell us about his time-lapse photography hack. Triggering of the camera is done via CHDK, or Canon Hack Development kit. This experimental kit allows Canon Powershot cameras to run scripts as well as other neat features without permanently changing anything. User scripts for this hack and others can be found here.

Once the Camera was set up to take pictures in a predetermined amount of time, a LDR (light dependent resistor) is used to detect when a picture is actually taken. A LED on the camera flashes every time an image is stored in the camera, so this provided an easy way to sense when this happens.

Once this signal is received, a PIC 16f84 processor and the associated circuitry then causes the stepper to step once per shot. The results of this experiment are very impressive, so be sure to check out the results after the break.

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Tesla Coil Bullet-time Photography

June 29, 2011 by 20 Comments

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One thing we can all probably agree on is that Tesla coils are one part high-voltage electricity and two parts pure awesome. [Rob Flickenger] thinks so too, and he built a pretty nice one in his workshop some time ago. He took a bunch of pictures showing off the coil’s capabilities, but he thought that one photo taken from a single angle didn’t do much to relay just how fantastic it is to watch a Tesla coil in action.

Taking a cue from the Matrix movies, he bought a stack of Canon point and shoot cameras and constructed a bullet time rig in his workshop. In order to get the pictures just right, he flashed each camera with a customized version of the CHDK firmware that allowed him to trigger all ten shutters with a single button press. A few scripts help facilitate collecting all of the images for processing, after which he identifies the good shots and stitches them together. You can see the awesome results in the video below.

[via LaughingSquid]

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Motion Sensing Camera Hack

March 19, 2010 by 28 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlTyCymEM9g]

Researchers at the University of Liege have developed an algorithm to separate movement from background. They call it ViBe and this patented piece of code comes in at under 100 lines of C. Above you can see the proof of concept shown by hacking the code into CHDK, a Canon PowerShot alternative firmware. The package is available for non-commercial use and might be just the thing you need to get your project to recognize where it needs to serve the beer.

[Thanks Juan via Slashdot]

Laser Triggered Photography

September 30, 2009 by 9 Comments

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Popped balloons or bullets fired into apples, anyone can photograph with a quick sound based camera rig. Lasers have been used forever in motion detection. And even door bell chimes have been used before for remote camera shutter releases. No, [SaskView] wanted to go further and created his Laser Triggered High-Speed Photography setup, to photograph (of all things) milk splashes. We liked the simplicity of the project however;  requiring no programmed microchips or overly complicated circuitry – rather he took a quick trip to the local dollar shop, used the amazing CHDK firmware, and he produced perfect results every time.

[Update: CHDK, not CHKD firmware. My mind must be elsewhere. Thanks jbot and agent smith]

Pictures From Space For $150

September 13, 2009 by 47 Comments

prelaunch

Ever wanted to be able to launch a balloon into space, track its location via GPS, take some photographs of the curvature of the earth, and recover the balloon, all for the low low cost of $150? [Oliver Yeh] sent in his teams project, Icarus, which does just that. The group of MIT students found that they could use a weather balloon filled with helium to reach heights of around 20 miles above the earth;  their particular balloon achieved 93,000 feet (17.5 miles). Then, utilizing only off the shelf components with no soldering, conjured up a GPS tracker using a Motorola i290 Prepaid Cellphone. They then used a Canon A470 loaded with the chdk open source firmware to take pictures. After seeing the results of their launch, the team hopes that this could rejuvenate interests in science and the arts.