Micks Distractions

What is all this rubbish?

Well, it goes like this. I am build­ing a house, and I thought, (being a geek),
that it would be really nice to have a time-lapse movie of the house being
built. Now, that would be cool.

So this is my attempt at build­ing a totally auto­mated photo tak­ing panoramic box. Oh! Didn’t men­tion that. No, no. Not one silly photo of the house. What use would that be! I intend to have sev­eral cam­eras in a focal array tak­ing pho­tos,
and then stitch them together in soft­ware. As it turned out, it’s really not
that hard to do, but a lot of fun in the process. Which is the whole aim of
projects like this.

So.… Why?

Don’t ask such silly ques­tions! Next ques­tion.

Give me some details!

Well. I have an old power box, (the one taken off the house that’s being pulled down),
and inside it I have:

• Linux — Of course! Don’t expect to do any­thing fancy like this with any­thing else.


• 800MHz PC — not really pow­er­full, but enough.


• 20G disk — gobs of stor­age, enough for 1 month of photos.


• 5 port USB card — for all those cameras.


• 2x net­work cards — one for the cable modem, the other for my laptop.




• Modem — just in case some­thing goes wrong.


• Cable modem — for upload­ing to backup server, and webserver.


• Key­board — stu­pid PC doesn’t like boot­ing with­out one.


• 5 Benq DC1300 cam­eras — nice 125 degree panorama!


• UPS — just in case some builder pulls the plug on me.


• mini hub — so I can come along and down­load pics to my laptop.

I had to alter an exist­ing Linux ker­nel dri­ver for the Benq DC1300 cam­eras. These are based on the SPCA504b chipset. Michel Xhaard has done a lot of back­ground work in get­ting a dri­ver going for other cam­eras. The dri­ver for the Benq DC1300 isn’t per­fect, as there are some pecu­liar­i­ties that crop up from time to time. But I can work around those easy enough. I didn’t get time to fix any of these prob­lems — oh well.

What about pictures!

The bare power box — just ripped off the wall of the old house.

Cut­ting the peep hole for the cam­eras to look out. This later turned out
to be a bad idea.

The inside of the box — a bit dif­fer­ent now though. It now has a UPS, and a
stan­dard tele­phone modem as well as the cable modem up the back.

The out­side of the box — the cams are now on top, though. The cam­eras towards
the back of the box didn’t get to see much, and ended up tak­ing a nice photo
of the inside.

My con­sole is an iPAQ 3660. Very use­full in emer­gen­cies. I plan to setup a
WiFi net­work so I don’t have to plug any­thing in. Just stroll onto the block and con­trol the cam­era box.

The panoramic array. I sim­ply adjusted two cam­eras to be in the opti­mum posi­tion
and then used gimp to repli­cate for all the other cam­eras. I
ended up spac­ing the cam­eras 25 degrees apart.

Set­ting up the box in the tree. Gee it was hard work! I had to setup a pully mech­a­nism to cope with the load.

First try out in the tree. I had to pull it all down again, because I had to repo­si­tion the cam­eras to be on top of the box.

The fin­ished cam­era box. This will sit on top of the power box, and give a full 125 degree pano. I bent some
clear plas­tic around a hacked up box, and then gen­er­ous amounts of silas­tic rub­ber to give a good seal.

Where the cam­era box will sit on the power box.

Aaaaand, every­thing put together. The USB wires com­ing in through the front proved to be a silly idea. Once I had put it up in the
tree we had a REALLY HEAVY shower, and the water ran down the cables and dripped onto the key­board inside. For­tu­nately noth­ing was
really dam­aged.

What it looks like inside, a bit hard to see every­thing, but it fits well.

Test­ing the sys­tem out. I wanted to get a WiFi card installed into the box, but I ran out of time. So, I have
a green eth­er­net cable dan­gling out the bot­tom of the box. Oh well.

And, fur­ther test­ing once it was installed up the tree, on an old SULO bin.

And, finally in place on the tree 15 feet up. Just enough to see over the roof.
The new house will be slightly lower, so I’ll still get a good view. Besides,
I have loosely attached the box to the tree, so I can shift it up a bit if I
need to.

And the view from the roof of the house.

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