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Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Old Webcams?
An anonymous reader writes "I work as an IT administrator at a school. We have just upgraded our entire webcam inventory (about 45 webcams, model Logitech Quickcam Communicate STX) and have all the old ones sitting around. I would like to know what a neat project would be to make use of all the old ones. I was figuring there would be an open project somewhere that involved mass amounts of webcams."
duh
They're not yours; they belong to the district. Get permission first. I'm sure your school district has policies about disposing of old surplus equipment (if nobody else in the district wants them). Disposing of district equipment WITHOUT permission is just asking for trouble.
Take out the ir filter, put in a visible light filter and use them for IR based multi-touch surfaces. A little expensive, but a neat project!
Start a civil liberties project. Build small UAVs, place the cameras on them and track how your local law enforcement is violating the constitution. Mission accomplished.
i assume you have a big pipe coming into the campus, locker rooms & pay-per-view site... PROFIT!
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/10/14/1840224/throwable-36-camera-ball-takes-spherical-panoramas Except use 45 cameras.
in google search: http://www.raphnet.net/divers/webcam/webcam_en.php
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/10/14/1840224/throwable-36-camera-ball-takes-spherical-panoramas
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/10/14/1840224/throwable-36-camera-ball-takes-spherical-panoramas
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/10/14/1840224/throwable-36-camera-ball-takes-spherical-panoramas
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Zoneminder!
MOD PARENT INFORMATIVE
Mount 36 of them in a ball, and then throw them up in the air!
Your question was answered 3 entries ago.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/10/14/1840224/throwable-36-camera-ball-takes-spherical-panoramas
For the remaining 9, you're on your own.
Get some USB hubs and make your own bullet-time setup.
If a million monkeys randomly pounded on keyboards, they would all log into AOL.
Mount them all on some base and point them to a certain point at the sky. Get the base to rotate accordingly so that they are all fixated at that point and keep taking pictures. Try and see how much of a detailed image you can end up with when combining all of the taken pictures. ddg.gg around for more.
is trademarked and patented.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_time :(
Big
Ass
Touchscreen
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Donate them to the federal government so they can spy on you more
And there are approximately 45 female bathroom stalls in your school.....coincidence? I think you know what to do.
Top that German project a few articles ago.
Hmmm . . . let's take a retrospective on the /. stories on German technology this week . . . a government spyware Trojan . . . wireless controlled bicycle brakes . . . and the throwable panorama ball. Put that all together . . . and you get . . . ?
I'm not sure yet, but we should keep a sharp eye on this tech coming out of Germany. They are definitely up to something.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The balls to say it anonymously :roll eyes:
You know that thing out of the matrix where all the frames are taken simultaneously but dispersed along the path you want the viewpoint to take when the frames are played sequentially as a video. Maybe bolt onto a frame, or stick around the inside of a room with velcro.
Cheap CCD + Rad source from smoke detector == true RNG. If nothing else, some of the advanced physics or math classes in the district might be interested in the project.
If you have a video class in the district, figure out a way for the students to use them for doing some matrix-style bullet time videos. Or if there is an electronics class, let the students tear them apart to see what they could do with them.
Webcams can be used for all sorts of data acquisition purposes, if you have some spare computers.
For instance, take a plastic egg-carton and grow 12 plants using different media (ex - a range of PH across the bays). Use a webcam to monitor the plants, and count the green pixels day-by-day to measure the relative growth rates.
Make a brush pile on school grounds and bury the web cam *within* the pile. Take an image 1/sec, and also monitor temperature. Throw out images which are the same as previous images. Use the data to watch how critters survive within brush piles, and how much insulation being in a brush pile affords.
Train a camera on the sky and take pictures over time. Count the white/blue ratio to monitor cloudiness/overcast.
http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=astronomy+with+webcams&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
Why do you have them in the first place? Is there some educational need for the school to have them, or they being used for security purposes throughout the school?
Take the lens off the front and bolt the sensor to a used SLR camera lens. With the 10x or 15x crop factor, that old 50mm SLR lens will turn into a 500-750mm equivalent, and if you use a prime lens, it'll have even better low-light performance than the original wide angle lens. If you put it on a telescope, you can easily get into 5000mm+ territory, although it'll be very difficult to use without an expensive tripod and tracking system.
Make your own bullet time capture device. Everything is better in bullet time.
can't you let the students recreate how they filmed the 3d "run around" scenes from the matrix? Would make for an interesting project... (this is what i mean http://theunhens.blogspot.com/2011/05/bullettime.html . In dutch, but the pictures should make clear what I mean)
I REALLY WANT TO DELETE MY ACCOUNT!
Believe it or not, I'm not interested in watching anybody take a shit. Then again, given the voyeuristic nature of CCTV in our cities I suspose it's only a matter of time before such oddball pathologies are normalized^w government policy.
http://xkcd.com/941/ -- This. would also be educational!
Find a birds nest somewhere on school grounds in the spring, mount a camera and put the live images up on the net. Allow students to watch as the eggs hatch and the chicks are reared.
This gets really *really* interesting if you can do this for a raptor nest, such as a hawk.
Web cams are generally sensitive to IR, so if you can cobble up an IR light source you can take images at night. Are there places on the grounds where critters come out at night (foxes, owls, skunks)? There's open source software to detect and automatically record movement from video feeds.
Come up with some interesting investigations that would interest the students.
Any old wells or pipes that stick up out of the ground? Can you lower a camera into one of these to see where it goes?
I remember the old Matrix documentary where they did the Bullet-Time effect by setting up something like the number of cameras you have in an arc and having them all take a picture of the focal point simultaneously. I think they then played the images back in sequence.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Yes! Teen girls who are unfortunate enough to not have a webcam are a worthy cause.
Suggestion one: if your school has a football field, try implementing something like XKCD suggests. Who knows, maybe the kids will learn some perspective.
Suggestion two: convert them to near-infrared imaging, and let the physics teachers and the art club go nuts with them.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
http://xkcd.com/941/
Set up a room with the cameras all around, all pointing toward the middle. Record from all cameras at once (this is perhaps the tricky part). Then you should be able to reproject the recorded data to create a virtual camera anywhere in the room, showing any angle. Think Photosynth, but with video.
Recording multiple streams simultaneously is difficult, since one USB host will only be able to handle a few cameras recording at a time (as few as 2 if the video is uncompressed). You can put multiple USB cards into a PC and push the bottleneck a bit further down. But ultimately this probably requires multiple coordinated PCs, which the poster may not have available.
amateur cheerleader porn would be better
Duh.
(I kid, I kid)
Yeah... buts let's face it. If it is going to be truly informative we all have to admit that the average Slashdotter would only benefit from 1-3 of those camera angles maximum anyways.
artsy types dig things they were too hip to use when that stuff was functional and had any value
Build your own light field camera that can refocus images after the fact!
Use them at door gifts if you setup at any job fairs for local colleges etc. That's what a lot of departments at Penn state do
Build a camera array similar to what Stanford has done (see http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/ ) for fast imaging, or building a camera array to refocus images after the fact (see http://lightfield.stanford.edu/ ).
Otherwise, you could do your own "bullet-time" live spin-around imaging system by placing them around a circular room.
This requires lots of work---
1. design a mount so that all 45 of the cameras can be pointed in exactly the same direction in a fixed array, say, 9 x 5, with exactly the same distance between each.
2. design a means to trigger and capture images simultaneously from all 45 cameras.
3. design a means to stitch together all 45 images that takes advantage of overlapping areas to increase resolution
So does this one ----
1. lay the 45 cameras out in a line, all pointing in the same direction, slightly upward
2. arrange a way to capture images from all of them simultaneously
3. write software to present any pair of these two to the user, who wears special heads-up stereo goggles and, therefore, has an adjustable depth perspective on the scene
4. make a new version of the same thing where the cameras are all in a (big) circle pointing inward
This one requires much less engineering work ---
1. Donate them to a worthy cause, like a school in a 3rd world country. Or, sell them on eBay and donate the proceeds instead.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I can think of several things to do. These would make great starters for science fair projects or in-class studies. You could hook one up to a microscope, or telescope. There are several projects on the web about making spectrophotometers. Use them for time-lapse studies of plants or young animals (frog's eggs developing). Use them for motion studies/kinematics. Have you asked the students for creative ideas? I bet there are several art projects that could use them.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Free software exists for that also in:
1.) Yawcam .0.3.6 -> http://www.yawcam.com/
2.) Dorgem 2.1 -> http://dorgem.sourceforge.net/download.html
3.) Active WebCam 11.6 -> http://download.cnet.com/Active-WebCam/3000-2348_4-10064509.html
APK
P.S.=> There's possibly BETTER ideas on this page, but this application for classroom/school securities' the one that comes to mind since you have 45 extra cameras around, & if classrooms have PC's? Then you have security systems in those classes essentially ( &, @ any time, NOT just night or when the school closes etc./et al)... apk
Companies have programs that donate surplus working equipment to schools and needy families. So before you claim all those webcams for a project, why don't you see if you can actually donate them for a worthy cause. Just because you have a ton of webcams doesn't mean you should do something wacky like this: http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/
Good point. Mount them in the girls locker room instead.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Use them to make a 3d scanner, a guy I went to college did it with two cameras and a couple laser pointers. With a bunch of cameras you could get some pretty accurate 3d models
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/10/14/1840224/throwable-36-camera-ball-takes-spherical-panoramas
Not sure what you can do with a computer webcam, there's webcam feeds like...
http://www.ciscopress.com/articles/article.asp?p=465446
Or if your one of "those" people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifelog
There's a ton of projects along those lines, webcams don't do much otherwise besides serve their initial purpose.
Donations are another option, so is the trash.
Try the boys and girls club or something along the lines of charity, I've gone this path before for getting rid of old IT equipment.
(Yes, I know this is Slashdot).
The cameras in question are USB 2.0 based devices, so that defines what's practical here by the USB standard. For example, if the project is worth about $29 US per camera, then cameras can each be located about 100-150 feet away from a PC, using CAT 5 based extensions to USB. If you can't raise about that much money for the project, it's out - for example mounting cameras near raptor's nests that may be 50-80 feet off the ground is probably only going to be feasible even with free student labor if there's at least that $29 additional per camera available. Figure you might get extensions a bit cheaper in bulk, but you might also need some things like silicon caulk to waterproof connectors, and I don't see it getting much cheaper. Whether risk approval issues would block such uses or not, this financial issue has to be considered in any location.
By themselves, limited range means largely indoor use in classrooms or a public setting. Maybe a sociology or history course could use them to record public interviews. Right now, many communities would like to record interviews with older people who were there since the town was built, or remember what it was like before the interstate came through or the old mill burned down or whatever. Interviewing Vietnam, Korean or even WW2 veterans is still needed some places.
Who is John Cabal?
Ask the students what they think should be done with them (in an educational context)
For the record, this is illegal.
The NRC considers this a "grievous offense" (their words), and people have been raided and had all their playthings confiscated for playing around with smoke detector emitters.
So... don't tell anyone if you do this.
a no-brainer
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/10/14/1840224/throwable-36-camera-ball-takes-spherical-panoramas
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Robotics?
Mount them in the girls locker room instead.
I like how several people made similar comments, but no-one seems to have twigged that rather than a horny teenage boy engaged in er... harmless jinks to see his female classmates naked (a) this guy is an adult member of staff, which would up the creepiness factor of the suggestion in itself and (b) he never said anywhere what age group his school covers. It could be a damn primary school for all we know.
OTOH, if this did occur to you when you commented, all I can say is... you sick, *sick* bunch of fucks. :-/
No Joke, set up an after hours program or maybe a during the day program to have teams of students use the cameras to do image capture and detection. Then have the kids build platform and put on a robot soccer match, this was something that happened at my college a few year ago, it was fun.
I remember Make Magazine having a project using: usb web cam + iRobot programmable base + router + usb hub.
If the router & web cam are controllable via the specified open source software.
Though this would obviously require funding.
I have been reading and commenting on /. since 2002, but I still see no point in registering an account.
Stick it up your arse.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Have a read of:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/10/14/1840224/throwable-36-camera-ball-takes-spherical-panoramas
And then make a 45 camera ball...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Try "Geiger Counter" and "CCD"
Radioactivity has a tendency to kick electrons around. If a particularly strong particle hits the CCD array, it will be registered on whichever pixel cell it hit. You can see this as a pixel going "white" for a brief moment on the video stream.
Put an alpha source next to a CCD array (which is otherwise light-tight) and you will get random white-pixel flashes. These are truly random, not the result of a PRNG.
Hmmm... If you're artistic, how about a budget version of David Hockney's latest experimentation.
Ask me about my sig!
I was going to suggest pointing them at the local cop shop or *IAA office, but then...
WTF?
I can't imagine a less appropriate place to "monitor" people than a school, of all places. IMO. Sounds like a real bunch of Nazis.
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
Put them around 5 gallons of dry cleaning solvent, and make a Cerenkov neutrino detector.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
Put the little cameras all over a little house and watch the Drama unfold!
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Contest:
Have all the students submit ideas, then let them vote on which project to do.
I'm guessing 50 school kids can come up with some pretty unique ideas.
Have the students use them to build a robotic rover. These will hook up to a Basic Stamp or a Raspberry Pi. Add a few motors, and voila!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
You don't have to find a nest. Build a house for something common to your area such as house wrens. That way, you can put the camera right outside, near the computer in waterproof housing.
1.) set up cameras in this year's halloween haunted house (assuming your school does that). Get some of the kids to splice recordings from Oct 31 into a montage of "funny memories".
2.) Make "observation boxes" for who ever can come up with a reason to use them. Figure 5-6 cameras a box, with decent lighting. It might be useful for some biology/chemistry experiments...or just an ant farm.
3.) Place cameras up outside near where the kids are picked up/dropped off. Basically, when ever a kid leaves the campus you've got it on camera (for safety, not so much for catching kids ditching class/smoking).
4.) If you're somewhere that gets a lot of snow, put up some streams of places on campus that kids frequent. Encourage them to view the cams from home before leaving so they know what the weather looks like. (Limited use, but it'll look nice on the school's web page.)
5.) Set 'em up on portable posts that can be placed on/near students desks. Once per year per class (randomly chosen), record every student taking a test and look for cheaters.
6.) Do the above, but for bullying. (Yeah, it's pretty "big brother"-ish, but if it's only once a year/month per class, it's not that big a deal.)
7.) Devise some kind of game that uses those cameras somehow. Maybe some functional version of chess?
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
How about you get with one of the science teachers and whoever else is necessary to set up a nesting box for a falcon or eagle or something on the roof of the school or elsewhere appropriate.
Set it up so that there are a couple webcams with external views, and maybe even one peaking into the box so if you get lucky the students can see it roosting.
My university (UMass Lowell) did this recently with and it was pretty cool to see the Peregrine Falcons up close.
Put all of them up on some old shelving, and serve cake.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Kind of piggy backing on this idea,
Get in contact with the drama department (assuming you have one) and see if they want your help in making a bullet time setup.
Same for the science department. Capture an event from 45 different angles or in a bullet time slow motion effect.
Do USB controllers have a max number of devices?
I put them in the ladies room.
But do those old webcams work on Windows 7? Cause my XP webcams don't.
Build some document cameras for your teachers. Get some goosenecks with sturdy bases and mount the cameras on them pointing down. Put together software that can mirror the image (some scripts + vlc will work). If any of your teachers regularly use a computer to project e.g. documents or slide shows, this can supplement what they are already doing. It's easier and tidier than a transparency, but more intuitive, familiar, and interactive than a slide show. It brings the added bonus of producing a paper archive of what was projected.
You can get some more information here: bootleg elmo
I realize this suggestion is maybe not in line with the idea of using a bunch of cameras for one project, but if your teachers don't already have something like this, they will love you for it.
"Preceded by itself yields falsehood" preceded by itself yields falsehood.
MOD PARENT REDUNDANT
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
The most useful thing that could be done with any tech equipment at a school, would be for a club of students to come up with projects to do with it and implement it themselves.
MOD PARENT REDUNDANT
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Simulate an alien being with many eyes!
Please turn in your geek card at the door. USB has a maximum of 127 devices including hubs per controller. Each computer has multiple controllers anymore.
sudo mod me up
The theoretical limit is 127 devices, but hubs count as devices.
There is also a limit of 5 levels. That basically limits you to 5 hubs stacked.
Your biggest concern will be bandwidth and power though. That many devices on a port will need powered hubs and you will definately not get any realtime performance out of it. If the system has multiple controllers it is better to spread the cams around on the avaliable ports and use as few hubs as possible. A driver allowing more than one camera is also neded.
It sounds like a fun project though, and I'd go for it if I had a tonn of cams.
Apply cameras generously to vehicle with duct tape. Then you have Google Street View, circa 2004.
Send them to college girls.
Crowd source your security to parents at work.
Record retro-looking films with them! Retro pictures and videos are the trend now.
"If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing."
Use the linux program called 'motion' to make your own motion-detecting video-recording security system.
I had a spare webcam and ended up using it as a motion-detecting video doorbell voicemail hehe.
I would point them at interesting points of the premises and have them take a snapshot every 5 minutes. I would then stream that data online. It is an easy way to find out where the action is.
A camera pointed at the various group workspaces and you can get a quick overview of where there is space. With cameras on the parking lot you've got a certain level of crowd sourced security and again you can see if there is space. If any science classes are doing projects that require a long time to mature you can use the camera to get a time lapse of the event. Or you could do 45 angles of your penis for chat roulette. That works too.
The snapshot every 5 minutes thing is to keep it from being too creepy and resource heavy.
And the fact that he's on the staff means that he wouldn't want to see teen girls naked? Now if it's elementary school, then sure - that's a problem. If it's high school, then why would it be wrong to be attracted to them?
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
That would be neat to do just as you said, but with their own little embedded computer and wifi meshnet, to send them
to the moon to orbit.
Might get enough old technology orbitting the moon that it gets it's own visible Ring.
If you have permission from the owner, look what the students could do with them in infromatics classes.
He was talking to the other AC.
circletimessquare, is that you?
Point them at the sky, make the data (historical and real-time) publicly available on a web site, and challenge people to develop their own algorithms to find anomalies.
Set up each webcam in a small sectioned off area and hire women to work as cam whores and take a cut of the profit.
I am teacher and trying out a comprehensive video documentation of each students basic knowledge of Physics topics. If you could hook them up to some recording device that can be started and stopped by a phone call, Students can call in a recording session to a certain camera/location and begin an explanation of a homework problem, a diagram or a lab setup. This could serve as a portfolio of work for each student..
Send them to me, I'll figure something out.
Lurking in the desert
When I saw the camera array focus through the bushes behind their subject... I was hooked. However I didn't have the budget, so I started experimenting with 1 camera and many shots from a small area... if you have stationary subjects, you can do the refocusing with a single camera and a lot of time....
Here are some photos of Chicago in synthetic focus as an example.
I would love to be able to build a portable 64 camera array.
I spend 100% of my moderation points down-modding comments whining about other people's moderation. With the other 100% I ponder binary. And with the last 100% I go after grammar nazis.
Donate them to a school? Put them on an RC car? There are endless hobbyist uses for them. I did read an article on the net somewhere about turning a Logitech brand cam into a ultraviolet camera. Was pretty cool. Google it. You could also just throw them out or eBay them.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Project 1: Do some AR projects. Can use OpenCV, http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/. Lots of project ideas out there. Project 2: Put up a camera in each class and record the class to have 'OpenCourseWare' - see MIT. Of course a lot of permission to get, but would help in multiple ways. If students miss a day of class, they can catch up. Good way to evaluate teachers, or they can watch them self to improve.
MOTION CAPTURE ARRAY
Put them in the girl's changing room and start up your own pay site!
There are a lot of other fun things you can do - like recording a sports game from "all possible" angles and then use the videos as a raw data for a film with the best moments.
Record the game, then let a few groups of students come up with one video each of five minutes each from what they think was the best video moments and then see how different the videos are.
You are of course not limited to sports events, you can actually use other kinds of events too.
And making a stereoscopic video (3D-video) would also prove interesting.
Mounting a camera on a remote controlled vehicle and drive that into hard to reach places to let the students get a view of how it looks under a building would be nice too.
And this article is also providing camera ideas.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
If it's high school, then why would it be wrong to be attracted to them?
People often have trouble differentiating illegal from immoral (yes, I realize that spying on someone without their knowledge or consent can be both regardless of age and that simply being attracted to >18s isn't what's illegal, don't get in the way of a good rant with facts...).
Zoneminder works well... warning though, you'll need something with lots of cores and lots of RAM. Oh, almost forgot to mention, it's free (as in beer) and open source.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
That's a serious question, why you replace 45 perfectly good working cameras with new cameras? If they were broken, then you wouldn't ask what do to with them. It's not like the quality of web-cameras matters, or that the cameras get worse with time. That's like you decide to throw away 2000$ for no reason at all.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
With one camera you can make 2D films, with two cameras you can do 3D. With 45 cameras... You could be the next James Cameron.
It could be a damn primary school for all we know.
And the fact that he's on the staff means that he wouldn't want to see teen girls naked? Now if it's elementary school, then sure - that's a problem.
"Primary school" == pretty much what Americans would call an "elementary school" anyway, (*) i.e. generally from 4-5 to 11-12 years old. So in that case- no.... just, no. :-6
And to be honest, even if we were talking about teenagers, while it's fair to acknowledge that some teenage girls- including some marginally under the age of consent- may be sexually attractive in an adult manner, there's a difference between accepting that and (e.g.) some 29-year-old (or whatever) actually installing spycams to perv on 15-year-olds. :-O
(*) (Couldn't remember the US term for it, but figured you could look it up if I was unclear. However, I now realise you could have misinterpreted this as simply meaning "main school" if you weren't aware I meant it as a technical term).
SAVE THE SCHOOL DISTRICT $$MONEY$$
Many districts have projectors. I assume your disctrict does, and that it gives comps to each class that are connected to the projector. Get with the shop classes, and construct a holder for them and create CHEAP, EASY, Elmos systems.
http://www.elmousa.com/
It is a great utility in my classroom and can save mega bucks. Just import the image feed through VLC player and BAM! Its done.
Rather than buying a document camera, just use these mounted on a stand with the webcam facing down to create a cheap document camera.
You can create a pretty cool random number generator with a webcam and a smoke detector:
http://slashdot.org/story/06/08/13/1311238/diy-random-number-generator
There's a difference between being attracted to a girl marginally under the age of consent- even if you're older- and actively going out of your way to spy on them, particularly if you were (e.g.) twice their age. It was the latter I was talking about, not the former.
Create a stop motion lab. Kids could use this lab to create all sorts of contents ranging from physics (cinematics for instance) to history. I'm sure they would be proud to hare their videos on Youtube. Later, teachers could use the videos on classes.
There is plenty of open source tools to convert a set of still images into videos and to edit clips, adding sound etc.
You could still do some cool time-lapse, collect pictures from lots of different angles sweeping across the sky etc. Power might still be an issue but powered hubs can deal with that. Bandwidth would only become an issue at the first level when you have say 20-30 cameras aggregated into one port.
I'm curious how much bandwidth a web cam can create because to saturate a 480Mbit link (USB 1.0 or 1.1 would be useless here) with 30 cameras it would take 16Mbit/s each to saturate (I guess a bit lower due to overhead). One question I have for any fellow slashdotter is, do USB hubs act like Ethernet switches and allow one segment of the network to operate at say USB1.0, while allowing the uplinks to operate at a higher speed? If not then this idea won't work if any of the cameras are USB 1.0.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/10/14/1840224/throwable-36-camera-ball-takes-spherical-panoramas is a nice use as well if you are bored enough to take them apart to mount and solder.
You could create an array of cameras to capture highspeed video
Look into local educational-institutes regarding arts, research, or computers? I'm sure they could come up with some very clever and much more community-rewarding endings/usages to your mass-cam issue.
I also liked the comment by jadin to let the students submit ideas.
Throw them out, man. Seriously. It is good for the soul.
While you 're at it, empty your basement too.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
Many corporate business models would call for the destruction of unsellable items of value to charitable or other worthy causes purely because if such gifts were to catch on, it would be potentially bad for business. Watching a supervisor for a well-known shoe company pouring paint over a plethora of womens' shoes that could not be sold was a little disheartening from an early age on for me. Obviously, he was aware that there were plenty of people who didn't have shoes on their feet. I believe that shoe company eventually sold out or went belly-up.
Randall Munroe nailed it:
http://xkcd.com/941/
give them to people who need them, like me, for doing multicam broadcasts
Live Electronic Music
I removed the lens from my old one and made a mount so I could insert the board into a cut down sink drain pipe. I use it in my telescope so while I'm controlling it from the laptop I can also see what the telescope is pointed to on the screen. No more having to look through the eyepiece. With some experimentation on focal lengths you can get the raw CCD bathed in outer space goodness, and running Stellarium at the same time is a plus. The Lunary Planetary Imager for this scope is about $100 USD and doesn't work as well.
I have some great videos of the moon and really good captures of Saturn and Jupiter. Now if I could just get my neighbors to agree that they don't need 6 lights on during the night. I treasure trips to the NorthWest. I have eagle vision and can see the rings of Saturn with the naked eye if they aren't straight on. By see, I mean I can detect they are there, but only in the deep desert or in the NorthWest.
I know this accounts for only 1, but it is a start.
Use them to detect alpha particles. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFNvYA7731o
Yeah, it cost your right nut and, even worse, still works as well as it did when new, but now it's just a valueless collection of plastic and toxic metals.
Same with me, but I haven't had the time to experiment. Thanks a lot for the link!
Oh I wasn't denying that it's illegal (for multiple reasons) - merely pointing out that any heterosexual male is going to be attracted to teenage girls, regardless of what the law says on actually acting on said attraction.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Get some cheap wireless routers with USB, install openwrt and convert them into motion-detecting wireless IP cameras.
when we get really stupid ass submissions like this.
Be seeing you...
The webcam can be used as input for a cryptographically strong random number generator. From the lavarnd website:
Unlike other suggestions made on a different thread, this requires no radiation source (the webcam generates enough static on its own), so the nukees will leave you alone. Open source so you can implement it freely and teach your students about the principles involved using the actual source code. It's also the successor to a RNG technique using captured images of LavaLite Lamps as a seed, which I think is awesome.
Good luck!
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
Make a CCTV on every corner you think could have a possible exit or entry. Or you could sell it for a lesser price.