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The Crawlspace Tankcam
Saint Aardvark writes "Here's a page on the fun you can have with a remote control Abrams tank and a wireless video camera. "I really wanted a way to look for under house leaks and stuff and, in the manner of a responsible home owner, get early warning so I could increase the effectiveness of... Ok, that's a lie. In reality, I wanted an excuse to put a camera on my R/C tank and drive it around scary tunnels, and this just happened to fit my purposes perfectly." Movies included!"
The page include a 6 digit counter at the bottom of the page. As we speak, its increasing by about 100 hits every 10 seconds... poor guy :)
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Like the bigger version of these Desktop R/C Mini-Rovers with optional wireless video cam?
The difference being the tank camera is mounted on the gun barrel and can be moved up and down, giving you a little more field of vision. The rotating turrent is nice as well since you can pan around without having to move the vehicle itself.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
http://blizzard.rwic.und.edu/~nordlie/robotics/mar k6.html
If it works. Last October, I bought what looks to be a similar tank (different colors, but otherwise the same) from II Sports.com.
On Christmas day we opened it to find that the turret only rotates through a few degrees. II Sports would not replace it because more than a month had passed since we bought it. One MONTH -- that's the length of their guarantee. I searched the packaging and handbook and their is no mention of a manufacturer's guarantee -- well, there is not even a mention of a guarantee.
So, we tell my son (the recipient of said Christmas gift) to play with it anyway and within a few hours, there is a pellet stuck fast in the barrel -- it will not fire any more.
Now, I have to wonder why there were pellets in the tank when we bought it -- had it been returned previously and shipped out again by an unethical seller?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
From the website:
2/11/05 - Just got posted to http://slashdot.org/ - Holy crap. I'm paying like $7 a month for hosting via http://www.hostsave.com/ and I'm hoping this plug will help me avoid getting a huge bandwidth bill. If you start up with them, feel free to tell 'em where you heard about them from! Please, I have children to raise! We have a pizza restaurant in Springfield, OR. 15% off any orders at Figaro's Pizza if you say you saw it on slashdot.
Ever since seeing Home Alone 3, I've thought that something like this would be a lot of fun (it never occured to me that it'd have practical applications also).
What would be even neater is if you could interface a computer with the remote and camera feed. You could, theoretically at least, take pictures of it's path through the house, and then write a small program to steer the vehicle around a pre-determined path, based on where in the cameras vision known objects are.
From there it wouldn't be too big of a chore to have the program notify you, or react differently, when unknown objects come into view, or if it gets into unknown territory. Just think, your own sub $100 roving security system!
Oh! And as for Home Alone 3... While it's by far not a great movie, it's actually pretty good, and is by far the best of the series (Yeah, I know that doesn't say much for it still...)
Wire the camera up to a DSP running image stabilization and enhancement software. An perhaps a PWM for the motor, (similar to those used to creep electric trains) so that he can drive at variable speed.
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Infrared is still visible with color video cameras. If you have a videocamera or a webcam, point an infrared remote control at it, an you'll see the IR LEDs blink. Does anyone remember the scandal two or three years ago about the sony video camera that had some filter that let mostly infrared through (?), which was abused to look through peoples swimsuits?