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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."
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!
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/10/14/1840224/throwable-36-camera-ball-takes-spherical-panoramas Except use 45 cameras.
Mount 36 of them in a ball, and then throw them up in the air!
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.
The balls to say it anonymously :roll eyes:
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.
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?
Superresolution. Doable, with the setup you describe... but 36 cheap cameras probably wouldn't do so well as just one slightly more expensive camera.
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.
2. Give each a webcam to setup at home.
3. Setup web porn gateway hosted on Ubuntu Hairy Hardon (rock solid!) connected to the 45 babes.
4.
5. Profit!
.
I feel sure you will not go to prison*.
*(Could be wrong)
The Machine stops.
I was going to suggest something like this, or "bullet time". Since those are taken, maybe arrange them in a ball looking out, and get the students to writing image stitching software. Then they could mount it on a cart and get some cool panographs.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
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.
That was my first thought too, but the resolution just isn't there. These are VGA cameras, 640x480. All told, we're only talking about ~14 total megapixels, and that's only if you positioned each camera so that they didn't overlap and stitched the image together. The fixed focal length would make that impossible, though, you'd only really be able to do superresolution on 45 very similar images, which would probably net you one or two megapixels of effective resolution. In the end, even a hundred dollar point and shoot would do better.
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.
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.
What is there to patent? If you can patent a sphere with 36 cameras then patent law is absurd, it's hard for me to think of anything more generic than a sphere with a few cameras attached.
I hope that your last 30-40 years of sleep have been good.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Actually, for solar system objects you don't need any fancy tracking with a telescope, just avi stacking software, like Avi Stack. You let the object move across the field of view as you film, and the software does the rest.
You can also put the webcam sensor in place of the eyepiece in a microscope.