Electric VW Mobile Photobooth

May 30, 2009 by Eliot 3 Comments

evbus

[Soren Coughlin-Glaser] runs a mobile photobooth in the Portland area. It’s built inside of an electric Volkswagen bus. The conversion to electric hasn’t been easy though. He’s spent most of the last few months rebuilding it after an electrical fire. Last fall he installed a 9 inch electric motor from Hi-Torque Electric after his smaller one blew up. We really like this project and look forward to seeing it back on the road… once he replaces his stripped transmission coupler.

[via Boing Boing Gadgets]

Wireless Portable USB Tether

May 21, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

USB

[Pete] has put together a fairly simple writeup on building a wireless USB tether for your DSLR. He’s basically using a pair of USB wireless adapters and a battery pack. In his original version, he did some slight modification to the dock that powers the USB dongle, adding his own battery pack too. He notes that this whole project can be done without the effort he put into it, at a little more expense. The only improvement we think would be nice would be a better way to package it to keep it out of the way while you shoot.

Goggle Camera Mod

May 19, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 21 Comments

finished-goggles (Custom)

[Will] submitted his ski goggle mod. He has mounted an Oregon Scientific ATC3K digicam in his goggles. This should make recording ski trips a lot easier. Most of the electronics fit just fine in the mask, though he did need to use an IDE cable to extend parts of it to the custom pack mounted on the strap. We’re also curious how much wind noise he’s going to get on that microphone.

GPS Logger With Wireless Trigger

May 10, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 7 Comments

gpslog

[Matthew] sent us his group’s final project, where they built a nice GPS logging system. Not only can it simply log the GPS coordinates on a predetermined interval, it can also be triggered to make an entry by a wireless device. In this example, they use a camera. This allows them to then upload all the GPS information and pictures to places like Google Earth.

They are using an ATmega644, with an LCD, SD card, and GPS unit. They had to do a little hacking on their camera to add the wireless transmitter, which triggers the logger. You can see not only the cost break down and source code for the project, but also a map with lots of geotagged photos. This is the kind of thing we can almost see as a standard item in the future.

Quick Cheap Ring Flash

April 24, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

flash1

Here’s a great example of a cheap mod that gets professional results. This ring flash cost roughly $14 all together, and they got to eat some fruit salad in the process. The parts list is pretty easy and can almost be figured out just by looking at the picture. A plastic bowl, an aluminum can, some foil, and a lens adapter. This is very nice and much easier than our last ring light post.

Linksys IP Cam Hacking

April 20, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 28 Comments

admin_password_extraction_2-300x216

GNUCITIZEN has posted information on linksys wireless IP camera hacking. It turns out that some models send the administrator user name and password to the computer when the setup wizard requests a connection. In theory, someone could send the request and harvest your passwords wirelessly. This seems like a pretty careless oversight. We would think that linksys will probably remedy this before too long.

Update: Part 2 has been posted.

Update: Part 3 has been posted.

High Speed Book Scanner From Trash

April 20, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 28 Comments

book_scanner

[Daniel] sent us his entry to the Epilog laser cutter challenge on instructables. He made a book scanner, mainly out of found parts. The bulk of the project was salvaged from dumpsters, though if you’re not comfortable with that, the free section of craigslist might be able to do the job. The cameras are loaded with CHDK, using StereoData maker, and custom software to compile the images into PDFs. They did a fantastic job of documenting every step of the construction, including helpful tips for some of the more complicated parts. There are several videos in the instructable, so be sure to check them out. We’re particularly amused by the extra step of making the photo captions visually interesting. At 79 steps, it’s a long read, but well worth it.