paparazzi

2 Articles

Anti-paparazzi Sunglasses

June 27, 2008 by 27 Comments

UPDATE: Video can also be found here.

Ah, the life of the work-a-day hacker: sure, it’s glamorous, but all the paparazzi dogging your every step can get unbearably stressful. Thankfully, you have a recourse with these anti-paparazzi sunglasses. They work by mounting two small infrared lights on the front. The wearer is completely inconspicuous to the human eye, but cameras only see a big white blur where your face should be.

Building them is a snap: just take a pair of sunglasses, attach two small but powerful IR LEDS to two pairs of wires, one wire per LED. Then attach the LEDs to the glasses; the video suggests making a hole in the rim of the glasses to embed the LEDs. Glue or otherwise affix the wires to the temples of the glasses. At the end of the temples, attach lithium batteries. They should make contact with the black wire, but the red wires should be left suspended near the batteries without making contact. When you put them on the red wire makes contact, turning the lights on. It’s functional, but we’re thinking that installing an on/off switch would be more elegant and it would allow you to wear them without depleting the batteries.

[via BoingBoing]

24C3 Build Your Own UAV

December 27, 2007 by 18 Comments


The 24th annual Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin is already off to a great start. The first talk we attended was [Antoine Drouin] and [Martin Müller] presenting Paparazzi – The Free Autopilot. Paparazzi is an open source hardware and software project for building autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles. The main hardware board has an ARM processor and GPS. It uses inertial and infrared sensors to determine orientation and altitude. The four infrared thermopiles measure the air temperature. The ground is warmer than the sky and if you compare the temperature in the direction of each wing tip your can tell what angle the airplane is at. It’s really that simple.

They did a pretty amazing live demo. Using the network connection they controlled a UAV flying in France and another in Germany. Both planes were streaming live video from belly mounted cameras. One relaying through a home DSL connection and the other through a UMTS cellphone. They were able to change way-points on the fly and issue flight pattern commands. There is a ground crew at each location with a security pilot that will switch the controls to manual if things get out of hand.