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occy8
October 9th, 2005, 07:11 AM
I saw an ad a couple of days ago for a binocular with camera and since I have both lying around in a cupboard, I thought why not glueing them together. Thats what I did last night. attached is the result

First I had to get the camera (genius video camera III) working ( never tried that in Ubuntu before) it worked with xawtv
Then I had to find something that fits on the camera lens and allows me to glue it square onto the binocular, I tried many plastic thingies and finally found something. I used silicon glue because it is easy to separate again and can be rubbed of. I was surprised how easy it was to get the whole thing to produce a good picture. Turning the camera for the course focus and then fine tuning on the binocular. It is not pointing correctly (about 5-10 degrees out but hey it's a prototype) It woould need a machined adaptor for more accuracy.
The binocular I'm using is very powerfull 20 X 60 and I can see fine details 100m away.
the picture is always very bright, not too sure why, but it can be reduced by shading the lense

macewan
October 9th, 2005, 03:37 PM
that's pretty freaking cool!

macgyver2
October 9th, 2005, 05:32 PM
I saw an ad a couple of days ago for a binocular with camera and since I have both lying around in a cupboard, I thought why not glueing them together. Thats what I did last night. attached is the result

First I had to get the camera (genius video camera III) working ( never tried that in Ubuntu before) it worked with xawtv
Then I had to find something that fits on the camera lens and allows me to glue it square onto the binocular, I tried many plastic thingies and finally found something. I used silicon glue because it is easy to separate again and can be rubbed of. I was surprised how easy it was to get the whole thing to produce a good picture. Turning the camera for the course focus and then fine tuning on the binocular. It is not pointing correctly (about 5-10 degrees out but hey it's a prototype) It woould need a machined adaptor for more accuracy.
The binocular I'm using is very powerfull 20 X 60 and I can see fine details 100m away.
the picture is always very bright, not too sure why, but it can be reduced by shading the lense
That's awesome...I love when people make stuff themselves, if they can, instead of just buying a solution.

As for the bright images, it's because the aperature of the binoculars is larger than the aperature of the camera. The larger the aperature, the more light you're gathering. (That's why observational astronomers fall all over themselves to see who can build the biggest telescope.) The camera isn't set up for a 60mm aperature.

What you could do, instead of shading (I assume you mean with some sort of dark filter?)the lens--since that might distort the colors--is to make a cap that fits over the binocular aperature. Cut a hole in the cap about the same size as the original camera aperature. Start a bit smaller and if it turns out the pictures are now too dim, you can make the hole bigger. Now, you might think that you would get pictures that just show a hole with a lot of black around it, but that shouldn't be the case...all you're doing is blocking some of the light entering the binoculars.

I like the picture of the device...how about showing us some of the images you get with it!

occy8
October 11th, 2005, 06:31 AM
That's awesome...I love when people make stuff themselves, if they can, instead of just buying a solution.

yeah I thought you would macgyver;)


with shading I meant something similar to what you suggested
I'm waiting now for a full moon to see how it goes at night

here isa picture, bit boring because I don't have a laptop, just the house across the road approx. 80 metres away (hehehe with the xxxx sign) the pole is closer thats why its fuzzy and some branches are in the way too.

dmacdonald111
October 11th, 2005, 06:50 AM
I think that's a great idea! And don't worry about a fuzzy pole, it's better than what I could do with a top of the range digital camera and david bailey instructing me! lol

BoyOfDestiny
October 11th, 2005, 07:17 AM
I found this page when I was looking for nsf/spc/psf players for linux.

However the page has lots of other geeky things:

http://www.raphnet.net/divers/webcam/webcam_en.php

Things like hooking up a microscope to a webcam. Check the site out, lots of neat stuff.

occy8
October 12th, 2005, 12:07 AM
I found this page when I was looking for nsf/spc/psf players for linux.

However the page has lots of other geeky things:

http://www.raphnet.net/divers/webcam/webcam_en.php

Things like hooking up a microscope to a webcam. Check the site out, lots of neat stuff.

thats a great site, wenn I have some time I will try that infrared conversion, a cheap way to get a night vision camera. Also the SDLcam tools seems to be very usefull