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More Cheap Aerial Photography
ptorrone writes "If you have an old digital camera laying around and pick up a $1.50 Timer Chip from RadioShack or DigiKey you can turn it in to a great aerial photography camera, this how-to from Engadget shows how they did it along with some other projects with the modded camera." We also linked to part 1.
After the webpage in the article gets /.'d, take a look at this more comprehensive site on areial photography Kite Aerial Photography.
Some people have a way with words, others not have way.
Get into this hobby while you can before it becomes difficult and/or illegal.
I've never paid more than 20 cents for a 555, and I can think of at least 5 stores within 10 miles of my house that sell them for that price in single unit quantities.
Anyway, this is the 21st century. Why not do it the "right" way with a $1 PIC12F629?
Jason
ProfQuotes
Notice: Digikey link expired.
And if you buy most any component from radio shack, you are paying too much.
i wrote most of the article, but as always...there was and is a team of us, so it's more fair to say "they and we". i can't take credit for everything, it's a group effort.
The guy behind this, Phillip Torrone, has done a TON more cool stuff. Check out his site/blog for tons more stuff.
This dude is now my personal hero of geekdom. He builds robots and gear and has pics of tons of stuff on his site.
Chris
That's interesting, but I don't know how effective it is.
First, at altitude, focus isn't necessary because everything will be close enough to infinity (hyperfocal). So destroying an autofocus sensor won't help.
Second, my camera can withstand looking at the sun for a period of time (not much time, I'm sure). And that's a focused light source -- it'll be hard to make a laser brighter than the sun over such a large area. (easy to do if you point the laser, but hard to do if it's diffused). No real use in using a laser, though - you don't need the monochromaticity or the coherentness, so you might as well use a large xenon strobe behind an IR filter.
Lastly, won't stop any film-based camera: a cheap disposable or an Estes Cineroc.
Hope not too much taxpayer money is spent on this system!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Most decent digital cameras don't actually use IR for autofocus. For example, dSLRs like mine use image processing on to look for sharp lines and focus on those. Your super-dooper IR laser will just show up as a nice white spot on such a camera.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
The 555 is nearing its 30st year in production now. You can get a full blown microcontroller for the same price. There is almost no reason ever to use it. So you do not have to feel guilty - your teacher should for using such obselete parts as reference.
... so I used it not once, but actually twice.
I imagine it depends on your application. A 555 has 8 little pins, and therefore fits in a fairly small location. The 555 is also extremely versatile, and you can find any number of ready-made applications for it on the web, complete with schematics.
I built it into my own project, and it does exactly what I want, without unneeded additional complexity. Note that I used a 556 chip, which is a Dual 555 timer chip
Dave Ahlman's kite thingy..
radioshack? *coughradioshackisevilcough*