Joystick Operated Security Cam Will Overlook The Moat

July 13, 2012 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

What good is a moat if nobody is guarding it? We suppose that depends on what beasties lurk beneath the surface of the water, but that’s neither here nor there. The members of LVL1 continue their quest to outdo each other in augmenting the building’s automated features. The latest offering is this security camera which is operated with an analog thumb stick.

These are the people who are building a moat (which the city things is a reflecting pool) in front of their main entrance. Now they will be able to see and sense if anyone is trying to get across the watery hazard. The hack marries an ultrasonic rangefinder and camera module with a pair of servo motors. The brackets for the motors allow a full range of motion, and the signal is translated by an Arduino and Video Experimenter shield to put out a composite video signal. That’s not going to make streaming all that easy, but we’re sure that is just one more hack away.

Repairing A Thermal Imaging Camera

June 22, 2012 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

[Mike] got his hands on this thermal imaging camera which is designed for use by Firefighters. As he’s demonstrating in the image above, it clips to a helmet and has a display what will let rescuers see through heavy smoke. But this one isn’t working right so he cracked it open and repaired the damaged board.

The hour-long video (embedded after the break) is quite interesting. He starts with a disassembly of the unit, before diving head-first into trouble shooting. There is a PCB inside that fills the entire U-shaped enclosure. The thermal sensor’s habit of cutting out seems to be a symptom of this design. There is one weak point where the board is very narrow. Flexing or vibrating that section will reset the sensor, and [Mike] ends up replacing a couple of components before the thing is fixed. These include a resistor and a ferrite bead both of which are suspected of having cracks due to that board flexing. The rest of the video is spent with an EEVblog-style look that the components and the construction.

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Head-mounted Memory Catcher

June 21, 2012 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

A picture’s worth a thousand words so what is a hat that can take 360 degree pictures worth? Just make sure you put it on whenever leaving the house and capturing that next memorable moment will be just one click of a button away.

[Mikeasaurus] recently put together this… special… headgear. He used film-based disposable cameras and this choice presented a few interesting challenges. But the choice is not necessarily a bad one, as you can get six of these without really blowing your budget. He cut the top off of a plastic garbage can to serve as a headband on which to mount the hardware (zip-ties to the rescue). But things get hairy when it comes to triggering all of the shutters at once. These are spring-loaded shutter releases and you can’t just patch into them electrically like you could a digital camera. His solution is a group of six servo motors which do the button pushing for him.

A thirty-six exposure trial run turned out okay. Several times the shots didn’t come out, but at the end of his post he shares a few of the good ones that did. We’re going to stear clear of this one as we can’t abide manually winding all six cameras between each shot. But it does give us an idea for a single-camera hat that uses a 45-degree mirror which swivels. We’ll just put that one in the growing pile of ideas we need to make time for.

Keep An Eye On Your Palatial Estate With This Solar Powered WiFi Cam

June 13, 2012 by Mike Szczys 27 Comments

If you’re expecting the serfs to hop the fence with pitch forks and torches you may want to employ a surveillance system. WiFi cameras are a cheap way of doing this, but you’ll need power. [CheapGuitar] decided not to run extension cords, and instead added solar power to his wireless camera. The solar panels are easy to spot in this image, but you’ll have to look close to see the camera.

He already had everything on hand, and this included a cheap WiFi camera which runs on 5V. To weatherproof it he used a plastic sandwich meat container. This is actually one of our favorite project enclosures, we used it for our door-bell button garage door lock. [CheapGuitar] painted it black to help keep it hidden after cutting a hole in the lid for the camera lens. Under the solar panels you’ll find a 12V car battery which uses a USB car charger to regulate voltage for the camera. Each of the panels is a 5W trickle charger and they’re designed to top off deep cycle batteries. The entire thing is cleverly hidden behind his existing landscaping.

[via Reddit]

Quick And Easy Wildlife Camera

April 30, 2012 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

This wildlife camera is really easy to put together. You should keep it in mind if you’re ever tying to figure out what’s eating the heads off of all of your tulips. [Revoltlab] put it together, and although there’s one fatal flaw in this particular system, the concept is quite sound.

The build uses a camera, paired with an ultrasonic range finder. When something passes within the pre-set distance for the sensor, a servo motor clicks the shutter button on the camera. It’s all driven by an Arduino and powered from a 9V battery.

If you watch the video after the break you’ll discover the flaw we mentioned. This is a disposable film camera and requires winding between pictures. That hasn’t been implemented yet. But we’ve got an old digital camera with a broken LCD screen which would be perfect for the job. We’d have to do a bit more work to turn the camera on before taking the picture though.

There are a couple of possible upgrades to the idea. [Revoltlab] mentions removing the IR filter from the camera and adding an infrared flash for night-vision shots. But we would also recommend ditching the servo motor for a simple remote shutter solution as a way to avoid scaring the wildlife with the motor noise.

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A Camera That Describes A Picture For You

April 25, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

[Matt]’s Descriptive Camera looks just like any other point and shoot camera, albeit a little more boxy and homemade-looking. It even works just like the Polaroids of yesteryear – snap a picture and in a few minutes you’ve got a reproduction in your hands. Unlike any other camera before, [Matt]’s camera doesn’t give you an image. [Matt]’s camera gives you a description of the picture you took, printed out on easily-scrapbooked thermal receipt paper. Yes, mankind is now that meta.

To build the hardware of his camera, [Matt] took a BeagleBone single-board Linux computer and attached a webcam and a thermal receipt printer. The real magic is in the artificial artificial intelligence that is Mechanical Turk. [Matt]’s camera sends his picture up to the Internet where some random stranger describes his picture. This description is sent back and printed on the receipt paper.

Even though [Matt] is spending $1.25 to have a single picture described on Mechanical Turk, there’s probably not another camera as retro-meta-fabulous-fantastic out there.

Stop Motion Animation Creation

April 23, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 4 Comments

Stop Motion Animation has always been interesting to me since I “discovered” that one could make animated flip books by drawing each frame a little different. Fast forward 20 years or so, and computer technology has gotten to the point where this sort of thing can be done electronically quite easily and at an incredibly low price of a camera, computer, and free or paid-for software (here’s the technique using GIMP, a free, good quality photo editing tool) to put everything together.

The frames in the picture above are of my latest [PVC man] animation, which can be made with some electroluminescent lights, gloves, and some PVC pipe. Each frame was individually photographed, and after several hours of work we had enough footage for 17 seconds of so of stop-motion animation.

Although by no means perfect, the quality of these animations has gone up dramatically from the first animations that I made using an old ENV2 camera phone. Although I was using a “custom mount” for it, it’s amazing these came out as well as they did. As with everything hacking related, this process is a constant work in progress. Check out the videos after the break for the [PVC man] video as well as one of the early ENV2-produced stop-motion shorts!

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