Category: making things

iSight Car Mount

July 12, 2005

[Cross posted to and …]

Click for more…

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.

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June 29, 2005

making things moved from livejournal work

iSight Capsule

June 27, 2005

[Cross posted to and …]

iSight Capsule — Click for step-by-step pictures…

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.

electronics making things moved from livejournal

iSight Tripod Adapter

June 24, 2005

[Crossposted to and …]

Click for more…

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.

electronics making things moved from livejournal

·····

May 31, 2005

Click for huuuuuge…

To satisfy my desire to make something tonight, I pieced together some component video cables for a coworker. This is two sets of cables, one 18″ and the other 36″. The connectors are Neutrik NY352G’s and the cable is Belden 9259 copper shield / copper core / polyethylene foam coax. Heatshrink is random 3M stuff, and all parts were purchased from Parts Express, except the cable which is from the local Anixter location.

Off the top of my head I figure these cost about US$25 total to make plus about two hours of time. I’d put quality up there against the best commercially available component video cables.

And, it’s fun and gave me something to do.

Oh, I know the heat shrink looks like butt, but I didn’t take the time to trim the edges of it perfectly, and being adhesive-lined leaves gunk. Also, as the metal shells of the connectors heat, they keep shrinking the tubing long after I remove the heat, so some continue shrinking long after the heat gun is removed. This doesn’t matter, though, as all the solder points are dead on, and the heat shrink tubing is just there to look pretty, keep the connector together, and provide strain relief.

Yeah, I’m done babbling about cables now. Time to water the plants. Oh, that reminds me… New flower photos here and here and here. Yes, I know that the pansies are starting to look like butt. They’ve grown, but there are fewer flowers. Maybe there’ll be more flowers in a month or so. :(

electronics making things moved from livejournal

!!!

May 25, 2005

Click for more…

…so while talking to tonight, it somehow came up that I had made floggers / whips out of both network and IDE cable while working at various jobs in the past. Typically they were made simply by bundling the cables (or strands thereof as in the case of the IDE cable) into whatever handle was handy, be it a pen tube or a plastic test tube.

Well, for some reason I decided to make another, and proper, CAT5-based flogger. So, thanks to some boredom and a random burst of creativity, an hour and twenty minutes later I had it done.

Thirteen tails, each twenty inches long, comprised of six grey pieces of CAT5e, and seven of blue CAT5. In order to make them softer, more flexible, and lighter they have had the conductors removed. They are bundled together inside the handle with three large cable ties and friction-fitted into a six-inch metal (aluminum, I believe) handle. A blue / blue & white conductor pair from inside the cables is wrapped on the ends of the handle for finishing. The strands were straightened to eliminate the curling typically found in network cable.

In the end it turns out to be rather solid, with the strands having a texture like that of tanned leather. The strands are very solidly seated into the handle and will withstand a decent tug. It can also be swung with all the force I can exert and nothing budges.

In order to see the other pictures of the completed assembly, either click the photo above or take these links:

· Flogger with measuring tape showing it’s length.
· Detail of the handle and wire wrapping.
· Detail of the strands of cable.

making things moved from livejournal

!!!

May 12, 2005

Click for moblog…

So, yeah. In order to better contend with the extra bright light problem here at work I’ve expanded on my previous monitor hood. This still doesn’t solve my problem of having to sit under such bright lights, but at least I can see my monitor better.

Next I think I’ll make an actual wooden one with a nice matte black finish on the inside.

making things moved from livejournal work

Sour Mash Beer…

March 23, 2005

Click for lots of detail…

Well, there it is, beer batch #4 all fermenting away. It’s been about 20 hours since the yeast was pitched, and it’s happily fermenting. I attached my new digital thermometer to the side in order to keep an eye on things. It’s currently at 70.3ºF which is a bit hotter than the recipe calls for, but it should be all right. Maybe I’ll knock the temp in the house down a degree to try and bring it down a little.

Regardless, it’s fermenting away… Hopefully it’ll be good. Oh, this is the batch that was made with the sour mash. I overshot in adding water, so it’s a little weaker than I intended with an OG (original gravity, or density before yeast is added) of 1.040. The target was 1.045 or something like that. This means it’ll be a little lighter and slightly less alcoholic than intended, but not by much…

Oh, and if you want to see a video of the beer churning around, look here: http://www.nuxx.net/albums/brewing_beer/DSCN0458.mov

That THUNK THUNK THUNK sound in the background is the bubbles coming out of the blowoff hose and reverberating through the bathtub. Each bubble is about half the size of a ping pong ball, so you see that making beer really kicks out a lot of CO₂.

beer making things moved from livejournal

How To Burn Down A House

January 29, 2005

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So yesterday I was at a friend of mine’s house when I noticed that he was throwing out an audio mixer. Asking why, I found out that someone had smoked it, then attempted to repair it. It’s current state was unknown, so I opened it up. What did I find? Something that made me worry about every single electrical repair the cuplrit may have ever done.

Why? Well, there it is right in the picture at the top… It seems that when the mixer was blown, two caps that are part of the photo preamps cooked. Well, instead of replacing them with the same parts, this “tech” chose to put together a bank of capacitors, then POT THEM WITH CANDLE WAX. Besides the fact that the bank of capacitors worked out to 50μf when the original parts were 47μf, this is so absolutely horribly dangerous. Using a potting compound that melts at a temperature around that of edible food and burns at not much higher? In a type of device which tends to get a bit warm with use? Guh.

It’s a good thing it was never turned on…

Fortunately I was able to replace the fire starters with $3 worth of proper components from Radio Shack. After fixing the cold solder joints on some jumpers that had been installed around burnt traces, I figured it was good. Well, it seems to be, and now this person can have his mixer back.

Still, I just can’t get over the idea of potting together electronics with candle wax… No matter how goth it is, it’s still a fucking stupid idea.

electronics making things moved from livejournal

Help!

October 31, 2004

To all the electronics geeks, I need help finding something. I’m looking for a 1U enclosure for a project I want to work on, and I’d like it to be plastic. I’ve seen them around online, but I can’t find a place to buy them.

Do you know where I could get one?

I’ve got a piece of gear I want to mount in an enclosure, and a plastic box would work great… And being rack-mountable would be even better. :)

So, again, what am I looking for? A 1U rack mount plastic enclosure, similar to the one seen here. (No, it doesn’t need any knobs or switches or whatever, I’ll take care of mounting those.)

Thanks!

electronics making things moved from livejournal