digital cameras hacks

981 Articles

Building A Snorricam

July 14, 2009 by 33 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoZOe3gOkco]

With digital cameras getting cheaper and higher quality, we find ourselves more capable of using them to make videos. A Snorricam can be a very useful tool if you like the effect it produces. This specific design allows for adjustment of the height and angle of the camera allowing for even more possibillities. As you can see in the video after the break, it seems to work pretty well. It might be nice to add some kind of vibration absorbtion though. Anyone got any ideas on that?

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Chalkbot Vs GraffitiWriter

July 9, 2009 by 30 Comments

For those who watched the Tour de France, you may have been pleasantly surprised to see some cool tech. Nike was using a robot to paint pictures on the street in chalk dot matrix style. It was accepted by the general public as new and innovative, as well as generally cool. In the hacker community though, a bit of trouble began to brew. The Chalkbot bears more than a passing resemblance to a project called GraffitiWriter. GraffitiWriter was a bot initially designed to protest the militarization of robotics. As it turns out, one of the early developers of the GraffitiWriter is behind the Chalkbot in a legitimate contract. The trouble doesn’t seem to be one of intellectual property legalities. People are mad at the corporatization of public work. They want kids watching to know that this system was designed by regular people in their spare time at their homes, not by a team of researches in a secret underground Nike laboratory.

The article takes a bit of a turn and talks some about the possibility of projects being taken and used for corporate advertisement. The specific item they are talking about is the Image Fulgurator which secretly projects images on objects in your photographs. You’ll have to go check that one out to see how it works.

Poor Man’s Thermographic Camera

July 1, 2009 by 24 Comments

thermographic camera

Using an IR thermometer, there are two ways to go about building a thermographic camera. The first uses a pan and tilt head. Scan lines are emulated, as a computer controls panning from left to right, taking a temperature sample from each step. Vertical resolution is accomplished by tilting. Another method uses a web cam attached to the thermometer. The thermometer’s laser pointer is captured with temperature annotations, as the computer records the field of view. We think the best outcome can be found with a combination of both methods. The video embedded below demonstrates the results. This would be a good addition to the Autonomous paintball sentry.

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Wide Angle Lense Mod For The ATC2K

June 25, 2009 by 6 Comments

wal

For those that have them, the ATC2K action camera is a decent little piece of equipment. It is waterproof and can save video for roughly 30 minutes on a flash card. The viewing angle of the lens leaves something to be desired though. This has been remedied in newer models. [raalst] shows us how to modify the ATC2K to install a new, wider angle lens, while retaining the waterproof seal.  He also takes us through a necessary mod to ensure clear video under water since the new lens was not initially intended for it.  Just in case you are curious, he’s using his for hobby radio controlled submarine dives.

Magic Lantern For Canon 5D

June 24, 2009 by 10 Comments

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/5267475%5D

[Trammell] has released a new firmware for the Canon 5D Mark II DSLR geared toward film makers. The stock firmware was very limited on the audio side. This firmware adds features such as live VU meters, reduced audio noise, and crop marks for filming in different formats. The firmware is written in a manner that it can be extended fairly easily. Hopefully this will turn out to be as helpful as CHDK has been for point and shoot cameras.