I hope this isn't going to distract him from more important matters, like making his planned movie of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves. A TV series adaption would be even better, The Expanse has shown there's a market for fairly hard sci-fi on TV.
For electricity consumption monitoring, I also vote for the CurrentCost.
It is quite cheap (30 UKP), and is a very geek-friendly product. It has the all important serial interface which sends out the data every 6 seconds, but it is a TTL-level interface, which gives purchasers the oportunity to exercise or develop their hardware skills, by constructing their own interface with the widely available MAX232 chip and a few capacitors. It also provides an oportunity to exercise software skills when parsing and displaying the XML data the port sends out.
1) Get some *reliable* IP cameras and install them so they can view windows, external doors, etc. so you can see whether someone has broken in. In my experience, webcams lock-up after a couple of days unattended, causing me to worry about whether they've been stolen.
2) Get some external security lights with motion sensors and wireless transmitters, and some internal wireless motion sensors. Connect the wireless receiver to the serial port of a PC, and write some code so that it emails you when something suspicious happens.
3) Buy some DS1621 temperature sensors and a soldering iron, and have fun building a chain of cheap temperature sensors that you can install in various parts of your house. See pcTHERM and LundyCam.
4) Make sure all of the above kit, and your PC and broadband gear are *really* reliable. Expect to spend some time ironing out the bugs. Keep things simple, so that there are less points of failure. Don't install unnecessary stuff anywhere in your monitoring system. Avoid the latest shiny consumer-grade webcams, ADSL routers, etc. This stuff looks good in the shop, but often seems to be designed around the assumption that it will be bounced daily.
I'm interested in this as a replacement for network cameras and USB webcams on my website Lundycam.
Network cameras such as the Axis 206 are well engineered and have easy-to-use APIs, but they seem expensive for hobbyist use - the Axis 206W with 1.2 megapixels costs 300 pounds in the UK.
It's not clear whether these Nikon models can be programmed to take pictures at say 1 minute intervals indefinitely, when connected to an AC supply. Also, I wonder whether the autofocus and zoom mechanism are designed for continuous operation. I'm tempted to buy one to find out.
For low-cost low-light webcam performance, it's still difficult to beat the Philips Toucam Pro (aka Toucam 840). The electronics haven't changed for a few years, but I haven't found anything better in low light. See Lundycam for a comparison of a Toucam and a low-end Network camera at dusk.
The thing I remember most from 10 years as a VMS Sysaadmin and programmer were the arrival of the software upgrades. Even the decimal-point upgrades (eg. 5.4 to 5.5) arrived in huge cardboard boxes containg dozens of grey manuals and TK50s.
Then there was a couple of days to read the release notes, followed by the installation, which almost always went smoothly. I'm tempted to buy a VAXstation from Ebay.
City-wide coordination of traffic signals is quite common in Europe. Until a few years ago I was one of the programmers working on SCOOT. When I worked on it, it was possible to control an entire city of traffic signals with one small VAX (mmm...OpenVMS). It worked by collecting flow/occupancy data from sensors buried in the road (ususually inductive), putting them into a model (written in DEC C) running on the VAX, and then making a succession of small adjustments to the timings of the signals.
The list of interesting things you can do cheaply with a webcam, some 35mm lenses and filters, and optionally some programming is quite long and includes:
- extreme telephoto photography
- near-infrared photography
- low-light and night-time photography
- time-lapse photography
- possibly near-UV photography (haven't tried this myself)
It's possible to achieve interesting things just by removing a webcam's built-in lens/filter assembly, and replacing them with lenses and filters from 35mm camera. See Lundycam for examples. You can build an extreme telephoto camera in this way for very little money.
You can also change the webcam's behaviour (improving low-light performance, for example) in software by using something like the Java Media Framework.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope this isn't going to distract him from more important matters, like making his planned movie of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves. A TV series adaption would be even better, The Expanse has shown there's a market for fairly hard sci-fi on TV.
It is quite cheap (30 UKP), and is a very geek-friendly product. It has the all important serial interface which sends out the data every 6 seconds, but it is a TTL-level interface, which gives purchasers the oportunity to exercise or develop their hardware skills, by constructing their own interface with the widely available MAX232 chip and a few capacitors. It also provides an oportunity to exercise software skills when parsing and displaying the XML data the port sends out.
It's almost as if the designers decided to provide an interface, but also wanted to provide a few challenges for users to solve.
Here are some more links from CurrentCost fans:
http://currentcost.wetpaint.com/?t=anon
http://www.sgurr.co.uk/lundycam/energy_monitor_interface.html
Based on what I've done, I'd recommend:
1) Get some *reliable* IP cameras and install them so they can view windows, external doors, etc. so you can see whether someone has broken in. In my experience, webcams lock-up after a couple of days unattended, causing me to worry about whether they've been stolen.
2) Get some external security lights with motion sensors and wireless transmitters, and some internal wireless motion sensors. Connect the wireless receiver to the serial port of a PC, and write some code so that it emails you when something suspicious happens.
3) Buy some DS1621 temperature sensors and a soldering iron, and have fun building a chain of cheap temperature sensors that you can install in various parts of your house. See pcTHERM and LundyCam.
4) Make sure all of the above kit, and your PC and broadband gear are *really* reliable. Expect to spend some time ironing out the bugs. Keep things simple, so that there are less points of failure. Don't install unnecessary stuff anywhere in your monitoring system. Avoid the latest shiny consumer-grade webcams, ADSL routers, etc. This stuff looks good in the shop, but often seems to be designed around the assumption that it will be bounced daily.
I'm interested in this as a replacement for network cameras and USB webcams on my website Lundycam.
Network cameras such as the Axis 206 are well engineered and have easy-to-use APIs, but they seem expensive for hobbyist use - the Axis 206W with 1.2 megapixels costs 300 pounds in the UK.
It's not clear whether these Nikon models can be programmed to take pictures at say 1 minute intervals indefinitely, when connected to an AC supply. Also, I wonder whether the autofocus and zoom mechanism are designed for continuous operation. I'm tempted to buy one to find out.
For low-cost low-light webcam performance, it's still difficult to beat the Philips Toucam Pro (aka Toucam 840). The electronics haven't changed for a few years, but I haven't found anything better in low light. See Lundycam for a comparison of a Toucam and a low-end Network camera at dusk.
The thing I remember most from 10 years as a VMS Sysaadmin and programmer were the arrival of the software upgrades. Even the decimal-point upgrades (eg. 5.4 to 5.5) arrived in huge cardboard boxes containg dozens of grey manuals and TK50s.
Then there was a couple of days to read the release notes, followed by the installation, which almost always went smoothly. I'm tempted to buy a VAXstation from Ebay.
City-wide coordination of traffic signals is quite common in Europe. Until a few years ago I was one of the programmers working on SCOOT. When I worked on it, it was possible to control an entire city of traffic signals with one small VAX (mmm...OpenVMS). It worked by collecting flow/occupancy data from sensors buried in the road (ususually inductive), putting them into a model (written in DEC C) running on the VAX, and then making a succession of small adjustments to the timings of the signals.
The list of interesting things you can do cheaply with a webcam, some 35mm lenses and filters, and optionally some programming is quite long and includes:
- extreme telephoto photography
- near-infrared photography
- low-light and night-time photography
- time-lapse photography
- possibly near-UV photography (haven't tried this myself)
There are some examples at LundyCam.
It's possible to achieve interesting things just by removing a webcam's built-in lens/filter assembly, and replacing them with lenses and filters from 35mm camera. See Lundycam for examples. You can build an extreme telephoto camera in this way for very little money.
You can also change the webcam's behaviour (improving low-light performance, for example) in software by using something like the Java Media Framework.