Did you ever find yourself in the keyboard section of K-Mart as a little kid, banging three keys listening to how the sound changed as you moved your head around? Not listening for the melody, but for the swirling sounds as the overdriven speaker in the Casio bounced sound off of the shelf, the ceiling, and whatever else was around?
Maybe it’s just me. I still love noisescapes, though.
I need to build another synth.
Well, the iPod camera connector is a lot smarter than I originally thought. After a bunch of poking around with a multimeter, it appears to do the following:
– Pass the USB GND, DATA+, and DATA- signals straight through to the dock connector.
– Bump up the +3.3VDC that the iPod provides on dock pin 18 to +5VDC in order to power the camera / memory card reader that is attached. (This, along with the disk access, explains the horrible battery life experienced when using the reader.)
– Somehow flip pin 21 to a value (10k? — perhaps in the presence of power?) which indicates that a photo adapter is connected. I was unable to establish this value.
Also, the connector is glued shut, so I’m unable to open it without trashing it. I guess I’ll take it back as soon as I get confirmation that the external hard drive memory card reader device that I’m looking at is shipping to me.
< sigh >
Yet another disappointment… It’s too bad I just spent $24 on ten iPod dock connectors. I hope they come in handy for other things…
Any friends want custom car adapters? Like, iPod dock to tape deck or car charger or something?
US$30 Shipped † As I’ve posted about here in the past, I’ve been manufacturing some adapters which allow one to mount an Apple iSight on a normal camera tripod. Well, they are finally finished and available for sale. A few months ago I was desperately looking for a way to mount my iSight on a camera tripod so that I could take stop motion video out my window. Well, there seemed to be no commercial options available beyond a simple, and quite expensive, plastic clip which required one to provide their own Firewire cable. In order to resolve this need, I went into my workshop and built something better. Becuase of the interest in the adapters after I showed them off around here, I decided to make some for sale. As these were hand made by me in my workshop, they are limited to a quantity of 39 pieces for sale. At this point I have no plans to make additional pieces beyond this first run. Anyway, I’ve personally hand-made these adapters to meet my needs, and they include the following features:
All of these adapters have been tested and are assured to work. So buy one, fire up your favorite iSight-compatible software (iChat AV, QuickTime Pro, EvoCam, etc), point the camera at whatever you’d like to record, and (thanks to the 15′ cable) leave your Mac a safe distance away. Be it watching the world out the window, keeping an eye on the pets, seeing who is coming in the door, or anything more personal, these iSight Tripod Adapters finally allow you to point your iSight wherever you want! Along the right side are photos of the adapter in a few positions. Click those images for larger copies, or click on here (photo gallery retired) for a bunch of pictures of these adapters. Please note that the tripod and tripod bracket are pictured for illustrative purposes only. This sale is for one adapter with integrated cable. The additional hardware is pictured because I want to show how the adapter can be used with a standard tripod. So, if you’d like one, go ahead and click the button down below to send payment (US$30) and I’ll get your new iSight Tripod Adapter shipped out to you right away. If the button is missing, I have sold out of the adapters. Sorry! † US addresses, PO Boxes, and Military Addresses Only. Please contact me for international shipping rates before sending payment. |
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After the iSight Tripod Adapter project I’m tempted to try making something like these to see how good they might sound. I’m sure that a visit to Parts Express and a decent amp could get me started… It’d be nifty to make some nice sounding speakers, too.
Well, I just sent off payment for 40 15′ long Firewire cables. On the way home from the dentist’s office tonight (I’m going by there to do some computer work) I’ll grab some more PVC pipe, some endcaps, some tee nuts, some paint, and get started on things. Hopefully within two weeks I’ll actually have them ready for sale…
[Cross posted to
So I’ve been thinking of manufacturing about 40 of those iSight tripod adapters and selling them. I’m thinking of making them a bit shorter than the one I have (there’s a lot of air space in there) and painting them black or so.
Price would be US$35 shipped within the US, slightly more to elsewhere.
I’m curious, do you all think this is a good idea? And, would you be interested in buying one?
Here is a shot of the device itself, similar to what would be for sale. Except the ones I sell will likely be painted black.
Right now I’m trying to get prices on Firewire cables, but I’m thinking I’d end up with 15′ cables, leaving about 14.5′ hanging out of the adapter. The extra length is there so that it’s possible to have the iSight mounted on the tripod, and the computer a goodly ways away.
So, interested? Your thoughts?
[Cross posted to
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.
[Cross posted to
As some of you might remember, I posted last Friday about the iSight Tripod Adapter that I pieced together in order to mount my iSight on a standard 1/4″ camera mount on a tripod.
Since making it, I’ve decided that the hot glue spilling from the top and the cable hole in the back were rather unsightly, and the whole iSight Tripod Adapter had an overall low-quality feel.
Because of this I went ahead and built another this evening, putting into practice the ideas I had for various improvements. As part of building this, I took pictures of most every step along the way and added captions so that it can serve as a tutorial. So, if you are interested in a tripod mount for your iSight, be sure to give this series of photos for what I call the iSight Capsule a look. It has all the important steps for manufacture and assembly detailed in text and high resolution photos. Someone who is fairly mechanically inclined should have no problem building one based on this. It really is a simple, fairly low-cost project.
I held off for a few hours on posting this for a few hours as I debated selling them†, but I just don’t feel like doing the work, and I think that everyone (in LJ and beyond) can benefit better from having the text and photos out there and available.
So, I hope everyone enjoys this, and that if you make one, it comes out well. I personally think that the iSight Capsule looks a whole lot better than the original iSight Tripod Adapter. (Old iSight Tripod Adapter · New iSight Capsule)
Enjoy this project. I know I had fun making it. To begin, just click this link and keep clicking >> to step through the pictures one at a time. Or you can just click here to hop right into a JavaScript slideshow of all the images.
† I can imagine that it wouldn’t be unfair to ask $25-$30 (USD) for these. People already charge pretty steep prices for crap products (DVForge, I’m looking at you, especially after my experience with the build quality of the SightFlex), so this would work well for hand-made small lot products. For the time being, though, I’m not going to consider selling the iSight Capsule.
[Crossposted to
As a number of people who own an iSight know, there really is no easy way to mount it to a tripod. While there are a number of hacks out there for doing this (eg: 1 · 2 ), I wanted something a bit more stable. There is a commercial product sold as part of the Kaidan Accessory Kit, but that requires one to use a thin Apple FireWire cable, and those are prohibitively expensive.
This morning while laying in bed I decided that I wanted to solve this problem so I could use my iSight on a tripod. So, I came up with the idea you see above and stuck one together this afternoon. In short, it’s a piece of 3/4″ PVC, a domed cap, a 14-20 tee nut, a 3m Belkin FireWire cable, and some hot melt glue. The PVC and hot melt glue were just laying around the basement, and I had originally purchased ten of the 3m FireWire cables on eBay about two years ago for $20 shipped. The tee nut cost $0.25/ea at Home Depot (read: overpriced) when purchased four at a time in a small plastic bag. PVC is cheap, so for a total of less than US$5 and about an hour’s worth of planning and building (and waiting for the glue to cool) I had the adapter.
There’s a good bit of room for improvement. If I were to make another, the first thing I’d change is the hot melt glue. While it works well, it’s hard to control. I’d try to find a way to apply it more smoothly, or I may dump it for a very thick epoxy. Second is the large hole cut in the back. I’d instead cut a slot and run the cable up through that, hiding all of the slot beneath the cap, leaving only a bit at the top where the cable comes out. It might also have been nice to use a cap on the top as well, with a simple cut-out for the FireWire connector. This may also allow me to use less hot melt glue / epoxy overall.
Hopefully people will find this useful. I know the iSight isn’t anything new, but being able to finally point it wherever I want and having a reasonably long cable should be extremely useful.
I’ve got a few more pictures up here which should be useful if anyone here wants to build one for themselves, or if you just want to look around:
· The iSight tripod adapter and cable.
· Detail of the back of the adapter.
· The bottom of the adapter showing how the tee nut is mounted inside the PVC cap.
· The FireWire connector end of the iSight tripod adapter.
· A tee nut, just like the one used in the adapter.
· My iSight mounted on the tripod adapter.
As mentioned in this Slashdot post yesterday, there is a rather interesting toy called the Juice Box which runs μcLinux and can display photos off of an SD card.
$12/ea at Target, plus another $11 for the SD adapter and a 32MB SD card. Should be interesting to play with…
And… Of course… The first image displayed on it was this one.
