The Dirkon Paper Camera

Dirkon Camera

now this is something. apparently back in the 1970s when communism was all the rage, it was hard to get a hold of decent magazines so people would share them. one magazine though roughly translated to “An ABC of Young Technicians and Natural Scientists” published an article showing how to make a fully functional camera out of stiff paper. yes, its 35mm too. it’s called the “Dirkon” paper camera and obviously bears a pun to the tune of nikon. there’s even a few sample photos to go along with how to make it. we wanna see someone make a modern day one

Make An Infrared Webcam

IR webcam hack

First off — don’t go getting all Silence of the lambs on us, aight? But if you’ve got some legitimate, non-creepy reason you want to record video in infrared, Geoff Johnson’s gonna show you how to do it. He’s gutting a fairly generic USB camera made by Sweex, and is careful to note which steps are Sweex-specific and which are not. You should be able to get this working with any ol’ USB cam you’ve got lying around with possible slight modifications.

Underwater Video Camera

underwater camera housing
in this article, paul hart details the third revision of his underwater camera housing.  by using a few reed switches that interface with the camera remote (for zoom control) and a small solenoid (to depress the record button), he is able to control the camera from the outside of the housing with a magnet.  don’t miss the page that describes the electronics.  it works well, it looks good, and you can watch some cool videos that he’s made with it.  two thumbs up.  thanks for the tip, paul!

now, i’m sort of an ‘above sea level’ kind of person, but i guess one of the things that hackaday is all about is finding out what’s going on under the surface of things.  if you didn’t read it already, check out the article on making a timer activated camera.  we should combine some ideas between these projects and make a tethered still/video (or both) system that you just toss off the side of a boat.  got a better idea?  let’s hear it!

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Geocamming — Unsecurity Cameras Revisited

unsecured security camera

this one is for all the people who couldn’t see the netcams from sunday’s post.  it turns out that the web interface to these cameras can serve both motion-jpeg and traditional jpeg frames (the latter with browser refresh). unfortunately, many browsers (including safari on my machine) don’t appear to handle motion-jpeg.

no need to switch browsers, though. you can use google to filter out the motion-jpeg urls. you’ll even benefit by reducing the amount of bandwidth you use (really nice for the slow camera connections). just google for inurl:”ViewerFrame?Mode=Refresh”

there’s something incredibly cool about seeing what is happening around the world. you can change the interface language to english by setting the language id to 4 in the url.

the cameras i’ve seen all have an image capture feature (brown link on the bottom left of the interface). you can take snapshots of what’s currently going on, or view captures that other people have taken with the camera. i wouldn’t be surprised if people start making a sport of this.

these all appear to be panasonic network cameras, by the way. in all fairness, they work quite well and they aren’t the first device to fall victim to people who don’t set passwords. here are some other nice geocamming start points.
axis cameras: jpeg, motion-jpeg, with interface and canon too.

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Homebrew, Autonomous, High Altitude Glider

high altitude glider

there are incredible hacks and then there are projects so unreal that the term hack just doesn’t seem appropriate.

this one fits squarely into the latter category and i’m posting it anyway.

art vanden berg details 4 years of designing a balloon launched glider that flies itself to a safe landing point using custom software running on a pc104 setup with a gps receiver, quickcam, 35mm camera, and packet radio. mission control is equally impressive with more custom software that tracks telemetry data, downloads real-time quickcam stills, and provides manual override of normal flight operation if necessary.

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Add Location Data To Photos (latitude And Longitude)

sat

awhile back i wrote how to take gps data and use that to make satellite maps. well, at least once a week i get an email or instant message asking if there is a way to get gps data in to photos, or out. it seems a lot of people are really interested in this. which is great, imagine being able to search the web for locations and seeing the photos or sorting your photos by where they were taken automatically. here’s an app that helps that along–gpsphotolinker can be used to save gps position data to a photo. the latitude and longitude recorded by your gps unit while you were taking photos can be linked, and saved, to the photos.

it’s for mac only for now, if there’s a pc version that does the same thing i’ll post it up. this is a great tool for all sorts of camera / gps hack projects, we’ll have some of those up soon here too.

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