Rocket Camera

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

[Jordan] sent us his Rocket Camera project. It really isn’t much that we haven’t seen before, but we thought many of you would be feeling the effects of gravity a little harder today. So when your belly is stretched to its limits with Turbaconducken and you don’t think you can stand, take a little flight with [jordan]. Careful you don’t lose your lunch on the way back down though.

Flash Sync Port Hacking


Reader [Adrian] picked up a couple cheap wireless flash triggers on eBay. Unfortunately, his Sigma EF-500 DG Super strobe doesn’t have the necessary sync port to make use of these. He popped the device open to try to figure out a way to trigger the device manually. The first idea was to use the test button to fire the device. Thanks to lag, it didn’t work for anything under 1/20th. The solution was to go straight for the optical trigger. [Adrian] has posted some teardown pictures that will help you determine the appropriate solder points for your own mod. The only bit that’s left is adding a 3.5mm mono headphone jack as a sync port. He also has a post on modifying the flash for greater head movement.

Orientation Aware Camera


[Andrew Magill] just added his Orientation Aware Camera to the Hack a Day Flickr Pool. It uses a 3-axis magnetometer and 3-axis accelerometer. He didn’t want to spend too much effort on the USB side so he picked up USBMicro’s U421. It’s a fairly well documented preprogrammed microcontroller for USB. He later regretted this; his final sample rate was only 5Hz because of all the overhead. Using the positional data the, webcam image can be corrected for any sort of shaking. [Andrew] took this one step further by using OpenGL and stitching all of the video frames together live into a full panorama. Be sure to watch his excellent video demo embedded below. Continue reading “Orientation Aware Camera”

PS3 Eye As A Webcam On Windows

The NUI Group has been working hard to bring the PS3 Eye to windows.  From the factory, this device has pretty impressive specs, but no windows drivers.  After a bit of hacking, they’ve developed a driver for it and released it on their forums.  The main reason they are so interested in it is that it can capture full frame at 60 frames per second, making it perfect for multi touch sensing.  Now that they’ve got it working with windows, they’re working on a custom PS3 Eye filter for touchlib.

[via PS3 Fanboy, thanks vor]

Control Your Camera Remotely With A DS

Using a custom built cable connected to the lower GBA slot and a copy of Canon’s SDK, [Steve Chapman] has come up with a very clever way of taking pictures remotely with a Nintendo DS Lite.

Currently the software supports bracket shooting as well as bulb mode. [Steve] points out that he is currently testing an audio based trigger system using the mic built into the DS and the software is still a work in progress.

While the weight saving benefits of using a DS instead of a notebook are obvious, there are things you do give up going this route. Traditionally, when you tether a camera to a computer the photos are saved directly to the computer where you can view the image on a much larger monitor. With the DS, it seems all you can do is remotely trigger the camera. Given the size and resolution of the screens maybe that’s all it can do.

[via Boing Boing Gadgets]

Peek Email Reader Teardown

[morcheeba], who you should remember from CVS camera hacking, picked up a Peek and took some pictures while tearing it down. The Peek is a $100 QWERTY device with a simple OS designed only to check email. The device is being sold by T-Mobile with a $19.95/mo data plan. There’s nothing too spectacular to see other than 16MB of flash memory and a TI OMAP processor.

[via Make]