Low-Cost Eye Tracking With Webcams And Open-Source Software

May 5, 2018 by 10 Comments

“What are you looking at?” Said the wrong way, those can be fighting words. But in fields as diverse as psychological research and user experience testing, knowing what people are looking at in real-time can be invaluable. Eye-tracking software does this, but generally at a cost that keeps it out of the hands of the home gamer.

Or it used to. With hacked $20 webcams, this open source eye tracker will let you watch how someone is processing what they see. But [John Evans]’ Hackaday Prize entry is more than that. Most of the detail is in the video below, a good chunk of which [John] uses to extol the virtues of the camera he uses for his eye tracker, a Logitech C270. And rightly so — the cheap and easily sourced camera has remarkable macro capabilities right out of the box, a key feature for a camera that’s going to be trained on an eyeball a few millimeters away. Still, [John] provides STL files for mounts that snap to the torn-down camera PCB, in case other focal lengths are needed.

The meat of the project is his Jevons Camera Viewer, an app he wrote to control and view two cameras at once. Originally for a pick and place, the software can be used to coordinate the views of two goggle-mounted cameras, one looking out and one focused on the user’s eye. Reflections from the camera LED are picked up and used to judge the angle of the eye, with an overlay applied to the other camera’s view to show where the user is looking. It seems quite accurate, and plenty fast to boot.

We think this is a great project, like so many others in the first round of the 2018 Hackaday Prize. Can you think of an awesome project based on eye tracking? Here’s your chance to get going on the cheap.

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A Wireless Webcam Without A Cumbersome Cloud Service

December 8, 2017 by 42 Comments

After a friend bought a nannycam that required the use of a cloud service to make the device useful,  [Martin Caarels] thought to himself — as he puts it — ”I can probably do this with a Raspberry Pi!”

Altogether, [Caarels] gathered together a 4000mAh battery, a Raspberry Pi 3 with a micro SD card for storage, a Logitech c270 webcam, and the critical component to bind this project together: an elastic band. Once he had downloaded and set up Raspbian Stretch Lite on the SD card, he popped it into the Pi and connected it to the network via a cable. From there, he had to ssh into the Pi to get its IP so he could have it hop onto the WiFi.

Now that he effectively had a wireless webcam, it was time to turn it into a proper security camera.

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Giving A 4k Webcam Special Eyes

September 23, 2017 by 4 Comments

It’s a problem as old as photography: your camera is only as good as your lens. As cameras shrink, so do lenses, and so do the options for upgrading to a better lens. And forget about switching to a different focal length or aperture — it’s often just not an option. Unless you make it an option by adding a CS lens mount to a high-end webcam.

We’ll stipulate that at 4k resolution and packed with all sorts of goodies, the Logitech Brio Pro is a heck of a nice camera. And the lens isn’t bad either, as you’d hope for a camera with almost 9 megapixels at its disposal. But with an optical field of view optimized for video conferencing, it’s hard to use this premium camera for much else. [Saulius] fixed that by taking the camera apart and adding a new case with a built-in C- and CS-mount, resulting in literally thousands of lens choices. [Saulius]’ post has valuable teardown information, which includes exposing the CCD sensor completely. The new case is sold as a kit, but it looks like a 3D-printed case would be pretty easy to whip up.

[Salius] sure seems to love those optical hacks, whether they be a budget microscope camera, high-resolution LIDAR, or capturing license plates at great distances.

Low-cost Video Streaming With A Webcam And Raspberry Pi

November 25, 2016 by 32 Comments

Some people will tell you that YouTube has become a vast wasteland of entertainment like the boob tube before it. Live streaming doesn’t help the situation much, and this entry level webcam live-stream server isn’t poised to advance the art.

We jest, but only a little. [Mike Haldas] runs a video surveillance company that sells all manner of web-enabled cameras and wondered what it would take to get a low-end camera set up for live streaming. The first step was converting the Zavio webcam stream from RTSP (real-time streaming protocol) to the standard that YouTube uses, RTMP (real-time messaging protocol). Luckily, FFmpeg handles that conversion, so he compiled it for his MacBook Pro and set up a proof of concept. It worked, but he needed a compact solution that would free up his laptop. Raspberry Pi to the rescue – after loading a bunch of libraries and a four-hour build and install of FFmpeg, the webcam was streaming 1080p video of [Mike]’s sales office. He was worried that the Pi wouldn’t have the power needed for the job, and that it would be unstable. But as of this writing, the stream below has been active for six days, and it’s riveting stuff.

Raspberry Pis are a staple in the audio streaming world, like this pro-grade FM broadcast streaming rack or this minuscule internet radio streamer. And of course there’s this quick and dirty, warm and fuzzy streaming baby monitor.

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Counting Eggs With A Webcam

October 14, 2016 by 14 Comments

You’ll have to dig out your French dictionary (or Google translate) for this one, but it is worth it. [Nicolas Giraud] has been experimenting with ways to use a webcam to detect the number of eggs chickens have laid in a chicken coop. This page documents these experiments using a number of different algorithms to automatically detect the number of eggs and notify the owner. The system is simple, built around a Pi running Debian Jesse Lite and a cheap USB webcam. An LED running off one of the GPIO pins illuminates the eggs, and the camera then captures the image for analysis.

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Extra-Large Denial Of Service Attack Uses DVRs, Webcams

September 26, 2016 by 46 Comments

Brace yourselves. The rest of the media is going to be calling this an “IoT DDOS” and the hype will spin out of control. Hype aside, the facts on the ground make it look like an extremely large distributed denial-of-service attack (DDOS) was just carried out using mostly household appliances (145,607 of them!) rather than grandma’s old Win XP system running on Pentiums.

Slide from <a href="http://slideplayer.org/slide/906693/">this talk</a> by Lisa Plesiutschnig
Replace computers with DVRs. Slide from this talk by Lisa Plesiutschnig

We can argue all day about whether a digital video recorder (DVR) or an IP webcam is an “IoT” device and whether this DDOS attack is the biggest to date or merely among them, but the class of devices exploited certainly are not traditional computers, and this is a big hit. Most of these devices run firmware out of flash, and it’s up to the end user (who is not a sysadmin) to keep it up to date or face the wrath of hackers. And it’s certainly the case that as more Internet-facing devices get deployed, the hacker’s attack surface will grow.

Why did the DDOS network use these particular devices? We’re speculating, but we’d guess it’s a combination of difficult-to-update firmware and user “convenience” features like uPnP. To quote the FBI “The UPnP describes the process when a device remotely connects and communicates on a network automatically without authentication.” You can see how this would be good for both the non-tech-savvy and hostile attackers, right? (Turn off UPnP on your router now.)

We alternate between Jekyll and Hyde on the IoT. On one hand, we love having everything in our own home hooked up to our local WiFi network and running on Python scripts. On the other hand, connecting each and every device up to the broader Internet and keeping it secure would be a system administration headache. Average users want the convenience of the latter without having to pay the setup and know-how costs of the former. Right now, they’re left out in the cold. And their toasters are taking down ISPs.

Truly Versatile ESP8266 WiFi Webcam Platform

January 24, 2016 by 33 Comments

[Johan Kanflo] built a sweet little ESP8266-based wireless camera. It’s a beautiful little setup, and that it’s all open and comes with working demo code is gravy on the cake! Or icing on the potatoes. Or something.

[Johan]’s setup pairs an ESP8266-12 module with an Arducam, which looks like essentially an SPI breakout board for the ubiquitous small CMOS image sensors. The board naturally has a power supply and headers for programming the ESP module as well as connectors galore. Flash in some camera code, and you’ve got a custom WiFi webcam. Pretty slick.

pogo_pin_animBut since [Johan] designed the ESP-8266 board with standard female headers connecting to the ESP, it could also be used as a general-purpose ESP dev board. [Johan] built a few daughterboards to go along with it, including a bed-of-nails ESP8266 tester (since you can never tell when you’re going to get a dud ESP unit) and WiFi-to-RFM69 radio bridge. That’s two awesome applications for a tidy little system, and a reminder to design for extensibility when you’re laying out your own projects.

We’ve previously covered [Johan]’s Skygrazer project, which tracks planes as they fly overhead and displays them on a gutted old Mac. Is it any surprise, then, that he’s also created an ADS-B-controlled moodlight? This guy is on fire!