iSight Car Mount
[Cross posted to
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While at work yesterday I decided that I’d build a mount for my Apple iSight for my car. This way I could transmit photos of wherever I’m currently at, do stop motion video of driving, and all sorts of other things which the especially nifty iSight allows one to do.
So, as you can see in the picture above, I’ve got a mount built. This is more of my design test / proof of concept mount. I may build another that has a more polished look to it, as well. Probably some matte black paint, etc.
I’ve posted three videos which are the result of testing of the mount. There are two full motion tests which I took last night, and one stop motion† of my drive to work. The mount seems to hold the camera very stable, and the full motion videos almost have a video game feeling to them. Perhaps this weekend I’ll do a stop motion driving around highways somewhere Downtown Detroit, in and out of parking garages, etc.
Regardless, it seems to work as desired. Enjoy the videos. They are encoded with QT7 in 512kbps H.264, so you’ll need QT7 or some other compatable player to view them:
· Car Mount Test 1 – At night, on M-59 crossing old Van Dyke, entering the sunken concrete cavern highway area.
· Car Mount Test 2 – Driving through the parking lot on the southwest corner of Hall Rd. and Schoenherr, ending up on Schoenherr heading north.
· Stop Motion Test 1 – My favorite vid. One of the routes I take to work, start to finish. Each frame taken two seconds apart, played back at 15 frames per second.
† Stop motion footage created by:
1) Use EvoCam to capture a video with no compression, best quality, and best bit depth at .5 frames per second which makes for two seconds between frames.
2) Open resulting .MOV in QuickTime Pro.
3) Export .MOV to image sequence.
4) Open image sequence with QuickTime Pro set to the desired frame rate. In this case I found that 15fps looked best. 30fps was just too quick.
It may be possible to simply change the frame rate at which the QuickTime file is presented, but I was having difficulty figuring out how, so I did it this way.
can’t you get pulled over for obstructing your view like that?
looks fun, though.
Maybe, but it only sticks down 2″ below the rear view mirror. It’s smaller than a number of school / work passes, and WAY smaller than a handicapped parking permit.
cool. :)
In some areas, it’s technically illegal to leave hangtags in place while the vehicle is in motion. I know that I was supposed to remove my handicap parking tag when I was actually driving.
It’s a nifty mount. :)
Yeh, somehow I think here in L.A. the cops would think its a laser or bomb or something, definitely looks cool though.
It could really be made a lot smaller if I had different materials to work with. Unfortunately I don’t have a band saw nor any welding gear, else I would have probably made it out of square stock aluminum or something. It’ll also be even better once painted.
NERD!
A’Yup. ;)
can’t wait to see, for some reason i can’t get the movies to play yet. :/
QuickTime 6 won’t play them, so if you haven’t upgraded to 7, that’s why.
Also, if you’re on a PC, odds are you’ll need to install QT7, because I don’t think WMP plays H.264 (yet?).
It’s surprisingly decent for a ~4.5MB video.
I’m trying to think of a well-lit loop to do a nice timelapse of night time driving.
Hmm, I should probably establish a proper sample rate and such for night use as well… This worked good for daytime, but I’m not sure about night.
You Drive by my house!
Imagine my surprise a blog post with a video of someone driving by my house. It’s a small world…. wide web.
Geap
Re: You Drive by my house!
Who are you / where all do you live?
That’s pretty damn cool.
It’s also the first time I’ve ever followed a link from a blog (http://www.tuaw.com/2005/07/12/isight-car-mount/) and ended up on an LJ I’m already subscribed to.
Heh, thanks. The odd thing is, this person linked to my personal journal, not. Now I’m kinda curious who runs that site…
It’s a professional weblogging company, where “Professional blogging” means “Magazine publishing on the web has failed badly, but if we do as little actual journalism as possible, we can break even through Google ads”.
They publish engadget.com as well, which is a pretty good site.
Oh, interesting… I wasn’t aware of that. I thought it was just yet another blog.
AWESOME!!
thats really cool, how exactly did you make it? I dont know what the practical use of it would be, but its still awesome! You can email me at themystery432@mac.com. (my fake mac address, lol)