DS + 50D Timelapse Examples

December 19, 2008 by Eliot 3 Comments

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

We covered [Steve Chapman]’s Nintendo DS control for his Canon DSLR in September. He’s since improved the software so that it has a timer for sunset/sunrise amongst other things. He also shot about 30GB worth of timelapse images while in Vancouver and assembled a couple test videos. He’s still working out the processing to take full advantage of the 15megapixel images. We look forward to future results since YouTube is now using a much larger player for high def content.

High Speed Photography

December 14, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

high_speed

[Shakir] sent us this fairly easy way to do high speed photography. The idea is to use a microphone to detect a sharp sound on a surface and trigger the flash. The camera is set up with a long exposure to capture the action. Assuming your room is dark enough, you shouldn’t get much ghosting in your exposure. The circuit is a two stage amplifier that engages the flash using a silicon controlled rectifier. Be sure to check out the photos, some are pretty stunning.

MINI’s Augmented Reality Ad

December 13, 2008 by Eliot 12 Comments

miniaugmented

We were surprised last month when we saw augmented reality being done completely in flash. It hasn’t taken too long to go mainstream though. MINI has incorporated it into a recent German language magazine ad campaign. The fiduciary marks actually work quite well with MINI’s established ad format. Visit the ad’s URL and hold the magazine up to the webcam and a 3D model of the MINI Cabrio will appear. They have a PDF of the ad that you can print and use if you don’t have the original. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have cross-platform support.

[via Autoblog]

Disposable Camera Nixie Tube Driver

December 12, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

nixie_camera

Disposable cameras are quite cheap, and include circuitry that produces very high voltages. Because of this, they have been harvested for many projects. We’ve seen them used for coil guns and large high voltage power supplies, even for fixing rechargeable batteries that won’t charge. The latest in the long list of uses is to create nixie tube drivers. [the_don125] shows us how to use a single disposable camera to power 2 to 3 medium sized Nixie tubes. Be careful, as we said before, this project deals with high voltage.

GigaPixel Panorama

December 10, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 27 Comments

gigapixel

[Ewout] sent us some info on this Automated Gigapixel Panorama Acquisition system. The system automates the process of taking the large amounts of images required to do gigapixel panoramics. You tell it key information, like what lens, and what percent overlap you want and the system will calculate how many images it will take, as well as the gigapixel count. The results are quite stunning, no visible seams with fantastic detail. Interestingly, this was created for a class in embedded system design (ECE4180) at Georgia Institute of Technology and so was our post earlier today on Digitally Assisted Billiards. Is Hack a Day part of the class curriculum? It should be.

Tbeta, Cross-platform Multitouch

November 28, 2008 by Eliot 5 Comments

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/2034557]

tbeta is a new tool developed by the NUI Group Community. tbeta acts as an image processing layer to take in image data and output tracking data for multitouch applications. Whether FTIR or DI, scratch built multitouch systems generate IR video streams that need to be processed to find fingertips. tbeta can take this or any arbitrary video stream and run it through a series of filters to generate the touch data. This data is sent as OSC TUIO, a standard protocol for touch events. Along with the camera and input switcher, tbeta also aids in system calibration. I works on Windows, OSX, and Linux. Have a look at the getting started guide for a better idea of how it works.

[via CDM]

Recovering Photos With PhotoRec

November 12, 2008 by Eliot 17 Comments

photorec

A coworker approached us today with a corrupted SD card. It was out of her digital camera, and when plugged in, it wasn’t recognized. This looked like the perfect opportunity to try out [Christophe Grenier]’s PhotoRec. PhotoRec is designed to recover lost files from many different types of storage media. We used it from the command line on OSX, but it works on many different platforms.

It’s a fairly simple program to use. We plugged in the card and launched PhotoRec. We were prompted to select which volume we wanted to recover. We selected “Intel” as the partition table. PhotoRec didn’t find any partitions, so we opted to search the “Whole disk”. We kept the default filetypes. It then asked for filesystem type where we chose “Other” because flash is formatted FAT by default. We then chose a directory for the recovered files and started the process. PhotoRec scans the entire disk looking for known file headers. It uses these to find the lost image data. The 1GB card took approximately 15 minutes to scan and recovered all photos. This is really a great piece of free software, but hopefully you’ll never have to use it.