Micks Distractions

Aaaaaargh. I inad­ver­tantly deleted a whole swag of pic­tures from the 08/11 to the 19/11. These were mostly pic­tures of me and the plumber doing the drains out the front. I deleted them by mis­take when I was trans­fer­ring them off the cam­era box. Oh well. I should have done them when I was more awake.

The panorama cam­era is back up again and tak­ing pho­tos, but I can’t reach it across the net­work, must be some­thing wrong.

My panoram­ics, although giv­ing a good field of view, didn’t really cut it for secu­rity. I needed a decent web­cam that I could shift around. For­tu­nately, I man­aged to obtain a Quick­Cam Orbit. This gives me full pan/tilt con­trol, and there is a Linux dri­ver too boot!

My WiFi lap­top now runs the Quick­Cam Orbit. The rea­son for this was to avoid dis­turb­ing the exist­ing panoramic cam­era setup. My dad man­aged to get a spher­i­cal dome for me to house the cam­era in. He also made a small box for it, to be bolted to the side of the tree. Pic­cies below.

Read more…

I man­aged to obtain a Log­itech Quick­Cam Orbit. The good thing with this cam­era is that it has pan/tilt motors, and full Linux sup­port, (here, and here. I plan on set­ting it up in the tree so that I can have a bet­ter look around. Panora­mas are fine, but when I need to see what’s hap­pen­ing else­where I can’t. This will alle­vi­ate the prob­lem. My orig­i­nal inten­tion was to have all five cam­eras on a pan/tilt base, but didn’t get the time to do this.

Due to some very cre­ative demol­ish­ers ‘touch­ing’ the side of my box, I’ve had to remake a new one. My dad whipped one up for me. Of course, when you do some­thing again you tend to do it bet­ter the next time round. I’ve used a lot of the com­po­nents of the orig­i­nal cam­era box, but added a few. Namely an addi­tional lap­top, WiFi, and a wire­less X10 device to turn off the cam­era PC remotely.

One thing I’ve learnt from all this is that if you want to have a PC sit­ting
some­where remote doing some­thing — make sure that there are mul­ti­ple
ways of con­tact­ing it and con­trol­ling it. The box I have setup has a modem,
cable modem, WiFi, local LAN, remote power con­trol, and power pro­tec­tion. Good
enough for a Mars land­ing! Well, at least if some­thing goes wrong with one
method, there’s a backup.

Read more…

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.

Read more…