Building A SkyCam-like Camera Mount

August 3, 2012 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

With the Olympics on there are a lot of really great camera shots shown during the events. One of the best is the overhead view, which is provided by a camera suspended between cables. It’s not new for the Olympics, SkyCam has been around for over twenty years. What is new is [Dan Royer’s] attempts to build his own aerial camera setup.

He’s not starting from zero with this project. [Dan] has done some really great work with the Drawbot. It’s a two-motor, two-axis plotter which uses CNC to draw on a white board. For this project he combined two Drawbots in order to add a third axis. The image above shows the camera mount suspended between the four strings. He’s been working hard on getting the software ready for this kind of addressing. Along the way he broke the strings a few times because he was too far from the kill switch to stop it in time. But what he’s got is a nice start and we hope to see a more illustrative follow-up soon.

One of the things that SkyCam has going for it is a stabilization system. We wonder if a spinning gyroscope would work as well as it did for that balancing bike.

Using An Oscilloscope As A Composite Video Adapter

August 3, 2012 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

Confronted with a monitor that would display neither HDMI signal, nor composite video, [Joonas Pihlajamaa] took on a rather unorthodox task of getting his oscilloscope to work as a composite video adapter. He’s using a PicoScope 2204 but any hardware that connects to a computer and has a C API should work. The trick is in how his code uses the API to interpret the signal.

The first thing to do is make sure the voltage levels used in the composite signal are within the tolerances of your scope. [Joonas] used his multimeter to measure the center pole of the RCA connector and found that the Raspberry Pi board puts out from 200 mV to 2V, well within the PicoScope’s specs. Next he started to analyze the signal. The horizontal sync is easy to find, and he ignored the color information — opting for a monochrome output to ease the coding process. The next big piece of the puzzle is to ascertain the vertical sync so that he knows where each frame starts. He got it working and made one last improvement to handle interlacing.

The proof of concept video after the break shows off the he did. It’s a bit fuzzy but that’s how composite video looks normally.

Continue reading “Using An Oscilloscope As A Composite Video Adapter” →

EMF Oscilloscope Probe

August 3, 2012 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

[Tuomas Nylund] wanted a way to visualize the electromagnetic fields (EMF) around him. He figured the oscilloscope was the tool best suited for the task, but he needed a way to pick up the fields and feed them into one of the scope’s probes. He ended up building this EFM probe dongle to accomplish the task.

He admits that this isn’t much more than just an inductor connected to the probe and should not be used for serious measurements. But we think he’s selling himself short. It may not be what he considers precision, but the amplification circuit and filtering components he rolled into the device appear to provide very reliable input signals. We also appreciate the use of a BNC connector for easy interface. Check out the demo video after the break to see the EMF coming off of a soldering station controller, from a scanning LCD screen, and that of a switch-mode power supply.

Continue reading “EMF Oscilloscope Probe” →

Hackaday Links: August 3, 2012

August 3, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

Oh cool we’re famous

Last weekend, the Tech Team Radio Show over in Stoke-on-Trent interviewed our boss man [Caleb]. It’s a really wonderful interview, and I’m not saying that because [Caleb] signs my check. The entire show is up on Mixcloud and you can listen to the interview beginning at about 20 minutes. By the way, the guy who interviewed [Caleb] is now writing for us. Please welcome [Richard] to our motley crew.

Group buys are an awesome idea

We’ve seen Tindie, an Etsy for your electronics projects, a few times before. [emile] put up a blog post showing the impressive stats for the first month: $646 went to makers and nearly 29,000 unique pageviews. [emile] is working on a new project called Starter. This feature allows makers to gauge interest in their project and organize group buys for rare and esoteric components. We can’t wait to see this feature go live, and of course we’ll plug it when it does.

First Tindie, now fixie

[Adam] needed a way to store his bike, so he made a swinging wall mount for his fixie. The mount is bolted to a door frame and since it swings it’s never in the way.

The latest advances in blanket technology

During the opening ceremony for the Olympics, [schobi] saw some really cool light-up blankets. From this picture it really looks like these blankets are emitting light, but we have no idea how this was done. Does anyone have an idea on how this effect was produced?

coughRaspberryPicough

[Craig] needed a way to mount PCBs that didn’t have any mounting holes. He came up with a laser cut Delrin clip and put the file up on Thingiverse.

Electromagnetic Field Camp

August 3, 2012 by Richard Steele 7 Comments

Emf Electromagnetic Field Camp is a three-day camping festival for people with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, geeks, scientists, engineers, artists, and crafters.

There will be people talking about everything from genetic modification to electronics, blacksmithing to high-energy physics, reverse engineering to lock picking, crocheting to carpentry, and quadcopters to beer brewing. If you want to talk, there’ll be space for you to do so, and plenty of people who will want to listen.

EMF is a volunteer effort by a non-profit group, inspired by European and US hacker camps like CCC, HAR, and toorcamp. This year on Friday 31st August – Sunday 2nd September 2012 Will hold the first Uk meeting of its kind.

Events and activities will run throughout the day and into the evening, everything else (chats, debates, impromptu circus performances, orbital laser launches) will run as long as your collective energy lasts.

The Event is to be held at Pineham Park, Milton Keynes, UK.

As a Hackaday viewer you can get discounted tickets.

[thanks Jonty]

Moving An FPGA Project From VGA To DVI-D

August 3, 2012 by Eric Evenchick 23 Comments

It’s fairly easy to create VGA with an FPGA using a simple R/2R DAC. As [Mike] points out, this requires a lot of IO pins, and many development boards only support 8 bit VGA. Analog VGA is being replaced with DVI-D and HDMI on many devices nowadays, so it would be nice to port projects from VGA to DVI-D.

To address this, he’s come up with a simple DVI-D implementation in VHDL. The result converts RGB and sync data for VGA into DIV-D. Since DVI-D and HDMI both use the same signals for video, this can be connected to either input on a monitor or TV.

This implementation is shown displaying a test pattern on the Pipistrello development board, which features a Spartan 6 LX45 FPGA, but the project was written to be portable to other vendor’s FPGAs. With the right connector and a fast enough clock speed, this project should help move a project from 8 bit VGA to glorious 32 bit color.