Smile, Your Face Is On The Internet

July 7, 2011 by Mike Szczys 98 Comments

[Kyle McDonald] is up to a bit of no-good with a little piece of software he wrote. He’s been installing it on public computers all over New York City. It uses the webcam found in pretty much every new computer out there to detect when a face is in frame, then takes a picture and uploads it to the Internet.

We’ve embedded a video after the break that describes the process. From [Kyle’s] comments about the video it seems that he asked a security guard at the Apple store if it was okay to take pictures and he encouraged it. We guess it could be worse, if this were a key logger you’d be sorry for checking your email (or, god forbid, banking) on a public machine. Instead of being malicious, [Kyle] took a string of the images, adjusted them so that the faces were all aligned and the same size, and then rolled them into the latter half of his video.

Continue reading “Smile, Your Face Is On The Internet” →

Electronic Bird House Monitoring Goes A Few Steps Further

May 31, 2011 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

[Stephen Albers] offers his avian friends a lot of extras with this electronically monitored bird house. This will not only give you a look at what’s going on inside, but provide a source for several other bits of data as well.

First off, a camera has been mounted to the underside of the roof. This looks down on the nesting area and features night vision so that you can peek in any time day or night. He used a WiFi webcam that operates separately from the other electronics.

With the remainder of the setup he is able to harvest temperature and humidity data inside, temperature outside, force on the bottom of the house (although this turned out to be less useful than anticipated), and a in-and-out count for the doorway provided by an IR transmitter/receiver pair.

This offers quite a bit more than the last bird house project we saw. That one also left a lot to be desired as far as protecting the electronics. [Stephen] didn’t skip on that kind of protection. Most of the electronics are housed in an acrylic chamber in the base of the house. The sensors find themselves nestled in plastic enclosures, although some work needs to be done to ensure that the temperature and humidity sensors will still function correctly with this setup.

Displaying Video And Gifs On RGB LED Matrices

May 19, 2011 by Mike Nathan 14 Comments

led_matrix

[Mathieu] was on holiday in China and picked up some fun toys while perusing the numerous electronics markets there. The most interesting things he discovered were a pair of RGB LED matrices. They came in two different flavors, one made for indoor and one for outdoor displays, sporting a 64×32 and 32×16 resolution, respectively.

If you’ve read his blog before you know he is a big fan of LED matrices, so it’s only natural that bought a whole bunch of them and started experimenting once he got home. Using the same Atmel FPSLIC LED matrix control board he showed off in this previous hack, he was able to get the LED matrices up and running in no time. He adapted his webcam project to utilize the new panels, and he added a whole new feature as well. Via MatLab, he can now display any sort of animated gif on the panels, as you can see in the video below. The panels look great, and if we had a few of these around, there’s no doubt we would probably play this video on infinite repeat.

He says that the despite their somewhat questionable origins, the panels are of top notch quality, and he is willing to organize some sort of group buy if others are interested.

Continue reading “Displaying Video And Gifs On RGB LED Matrices” →

Webcam Turned Security Cam With Motion Detected Email Notifications

April 17, 2011 by Mike Szczys 27 Comments

[Sean] used his old webcam to assemble a closed circuit television feed for his home. He already had a server up and running, so this was just a matter of connecting a camera and setting up the software. He wasn’t satisfied by only having a live feed, so he decided to add a few more features to the system.

He started off by hanging a webcam near the front of his house. He mentions that he’s not sure this will last long exposed to the elements, but we think it’d be dead simple to build an enclosure with a resealable container and a nice piece of acrylic as a windows. But we digress…

The camera connects via USB to the server living in the garage. [Sean’s] setup uses Yawcam to create a live feed that can be access from the Internet. The software also includes motion detection capabilities. Since he wanted to have push notifications when there was action within the camera’s view he also set up Growl alert him via his iOS devices. You can see [Sean] demonstrate his completed CCTV system in the video below the fold.

Continue reading “Webcam Turned Security Cam With Motion Detected Email Notifications” →

The Basics Of Building A Multitouch Table

April 16, 2011 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

Here is a bare-bones multitouch table setup. We looked in on [Seth Sandler’s] multitouch work a few years ago when he completed the MTmini build. He’s scaling up the size a bit with the MTbiggie, and showing you how easy it is to put together. The demo rig seen above is just a couple of chairs, a sheet of acrylic, a mirror, a projector, a computer, and a diy infrared webcam.

The rig uses ambient infrared light to detect the outlines of your fingers when they touch the acrylic surface. A webcam with an exposed camera film filter feeds an image of the infrared light received below the surface to the computer. The incoming video is processed using Community Core Vision, where each individual point is isolated and mapped. Once the data is available the sky’s the limit on what you can develop. [Seth’s] demo packages include a mouse driver, some physics applications, an Angry Birds implementation, and a few others. See for yourself in the video after the break.

Continue reading “The Basics Of Building A Multitouch Table” →

One-eyed, One-armed Metal Rolling Roomba Robot

April 7, 2011 by Mike Nathan 11 Comments

roomba_robot

[Erik] was looking for a sturdy robotics platform and was initially considering the iRobot Create, until he found that he could score a Roomba Discovery series for a fraction of the price. The Discovery includes a battery, which is missing from the iCreate, though it also has all of the standard vacuum bits included as well.

He immediately removed all of the vacuum parts once he got his hands on the Roomba, and began adding the support structure to house the rest of his robot’s components. The robot is controlled via a small laptop which sits on top of the Roomba’s base, and features a panning and telescoping webcam to provide feedback to the operator.

The robot has been under construction for a little over a year now, and has had a few upgrades over that time. The original laptop was swapped out for a newer dual-core model, and the webcam was upgraded to a model featuring motion tracking. The whole thing has been skinned in thin sheet metal for a sleek look, and he has added a servo-driven arm as well.

The project is not quite complete, and he hasn’t really stated what he plans on using the robot for, but it looks good so far – we can’t wait to see it when it’s finished.

A Different Take On A Laser Projection Microscope

March 2, 2011 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

[Dusjagr] has another take on building a laser projection microscope. Last year we saw a laser-based microscope that shined the beam of light through a water droplet which contained the subject to be magnified. The droplet bent the focused beam of light and projected the magnified contents onto a screen. Now that’s pretty neat and [Dusjagr] has used that method himself. But most traditional microscopes use glass slides to contain the subject and this new version now makes that possible.

A bit of experimentation led [Dusjagr] to the discovery that a lens re-purposed from a webcam can achieve similar focus results as a water droplet. The video after the break shows the apparatus seen above in action. The laser shines through the lens, then through a slide that contains a water sample from a nearby pond. The image is clear, albeit completely bathed in green.

For us the most interesting part of [Dusjagr’s] writeup is his discussion of the limits of laser amplification based on the wavelength of light the diode puts out.

Continue reading “A Different Take On A Laser Projection Microscope” →