nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

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.

automotiveelectronicsmaking thingsmoved from livejournal

Car issues…

July 8, 2005

Well, I was unable to resolve whatever is causing the squeaking sound that I hear coming from my front driver’s side suspension. However, I am able to reproduce it when outside of the vehicle. I think the problem is a worn bushing or something squeaking against some metal, serving only to annoy me. There seems to be no issue with the drivability of the vehicle, but I want this damn noise fixed.

If you’d like to chime in about what the issue might be (please-please-please-please-please!), watch the following two videos. They show the two ways I have been able to reproduce the noise and isolate where it is coming from:


Now I guess I’ll go clean up my office and maybe get to work on an automotive mount for my iSight.

automotivemoved from livejournal

Petroglyphs and Ann Arbor

July 8, 2005


Click for huuuge…

As promised earlier, here’s a shot of the petroglyphs. Check out all of the photos here. Or, for the overview, here’s some of the other notable photos from yesterday’s wanderings:

· The modest sign at the entrance to the Petroglyph parking lot.
· The main sign at the entrance to the park.
· A beautifully fern-covered area one has to walk through to get to the petroglyphs.
· The petroglyphs are in a roofed, caged area to stave off rain and help prevent vandalism.
· The dome of rock which holds the petroglyphs.
· Goose, wind arrows…
· Some interesting graffiti.
· A peace pipe.
· The thunder storm which caused the guides and myself to hastily leave the area. It also made driving hard.
· A tasty ice cream cone I purchased from Moore Ice Cream in Marlette, MI.
· Some menacing clouds as I drove along US-23.
· Frank taking a picture from the top of a parking garage in Ann Arbor.
· Another impressively large cloud along US-23.

Oh, I must strongly recommend visiting this site… It’s rather interesting, seems to have a nice trail near it, and is staffed by friendly folks. One of the people there is a student at CCS and the other person lives somewhere near Flint.

So, yeah. Now I’m going to go eat my porridge with blueberries.

moved from livejournaloutdoorstravel

Daylight Bulbs

June 30, 2005


Click for huuuuge…

Okay, remember the bit about daylight bulbs before? Here’s a perfect example of why. This is the florescent fixture on the ceiling of my laundry room, with the cover removed. On the outside are the two new daylight bulbs, and on the inside are the two standard “cool white” bulbs.

I set the camera’s white balance to ‘daylight’ in order to be consistent and shot this in program mode so the exposure would be a nice, even middle ground.

See how yellow those center tubes are? Gah. No wonder things never looked right in that room. Walking in there with the light on now just looks and feels better. Things just seem right.

Unfortunately, when I installed the bulbs in the kitchen I found they are about 2cm too short, so they are up in the housings a bit. I don’t think this will cause a problem, but I’m going to wait until after dark to experiment with them and the remaining working old bulb. I might even have to return these (at $9.something a piece I’ll definitely return them if I don’t like them) and find something else.

Guh, this is a pain. All I want is bright daylight colored bulbs! Heh…

around the housemoved from livejournal

Fixed Car and Lights, Woo!

June 30, 2005


Click for moblog…

Well, it seems that the new battery has taken care of the problem. Provided nothing crops up with the alternator, things will remain good. Thinking back, my car hasn’t started this promptly in a year or two, so I think the battery may have been going for a while. Whatever the length of time the problem was happening for, I’m just glad it’s fixed.

I also snagged some daylight-color halogen spotlights for the kitchen. One of my old bulbs had burned out, and the GE Reveal bulbs I picked up simply weren’t bright enough. So I swung by Lowe’s and picked up a pair of daylight-color halogen PAR30 spots to take their place. I then returned the Reveal bulbs to Home Depot and picked up two more daylight fluorescent bulbs for the laundry room. I had picked up two the other day, but it turns out that it’s a four bulb fixture. I’d been wanting to replace the standard tubes with daylight ones, but I’d kept forgetting.

Can you tell that I like daylight colored bulbs? Good. I like them a lot. In fact, I try to only use them. Things look proper colors under them, and I’m fairly convinced that bright, daylight-colored light does a good job staving off SAD during winter or just periods of time where I stay inside.

around the houseautomotivemoved from livejournal

Car People… Help!

June 30, 2005

All the people who read this who know something about cars, can you provide me with some suggestios? I believe that the battery in my car is dying, but I’m not completely convinced.

What’s happening is that after the car has been sitting for a bit, it’s really sluggish to turn over. It cranks slowly, but after a few revolutions it starts up like normal and runs just fine. After starting slowly, the idle speed will swing back and forth between ~600RPM and ~1500RPM for about 10 seconds.

If I drive the vehicle for a few minutes and then shut the engine off, it’ll start right back up like normal. If I let it sit for a few hours, it’s sluggish to start again.

To me this sort of sounds like a battery which is reaching the end of it’s life. The battery is the original, and the car is a bit over five years old, with 120,000 miles on it.

It should also be noted that there are no engine or electrical problems while the car is running, so it’s definitely not an issue with the alternator not charging the battery.

So, does it sound to you like the battery is what’s going?

Thanks!

automotivemoved from livejournal

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.

electronicsmaking thingsmoved from livejournal

Digital Camera Archiving

June 26, 2005

Hopefully someone here who does a lot more professional photography than me can answer this.

In short, how do you archive your digital originals? Currently I upload them to a photo gallery which keeps original copies, then just back that up. However, I find that sometimes I may take ten or fifteen shots and only want to upload three. I’m thinking that it would be prudent to start saving all images, just in case some may come in handy down the line.

So, how do you do it? I’m thinking that maybe using a directory structure with all photos taken in a particular month dropped in there. Then all I need to remember is the month if I want to dig something up.

I’ve also been thinking about is captioning all photos and embedding this data in either a EXIF or IPTC header. The problem I’ll have is that I’ll need to somehow re-caption around 7000 images in order to bring things up to date. However, this would ensure that as long as the original image is kept intact, the caption won’t be lost.

So, what do you do?

computersmoved from livejournal