Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Hardware

Making a Homemade Webcam? 73

Posted by Cliff from the experience-from-creation dept.
Space-Bot asks: "I remember back in high-school photography the simple and very basic homemade cameras that we made that surprisingly worked fairly well. Amazing how something so great started so basic. These days we have all these high tech gadgets that do it all so quickly you never really think about any of the work behind it. Well I would like to start to understand the modern digital cameras more and I figure what better way then to make a homemade webcam of some sort. Might some of you Slashdot guru's have some ideas or experience for my project?"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Making a Homemade Webcam? More

Making a Homemade Webcam?

Comments Filter:

  • "gurus" (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 12, 2004 @12:48AM (#9671877)
    Not "guru's". There's no need for an apostrophe there, you twit.
  • That's about as home-made as you can get, given how cheap "real" (but crap quality) USB webcams are these days.

  • homemade webcam (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jpmkm ( 160526 ) on Monday July 12, 2004 @01:05AM (#9671943) Homepage
    Step 1: Buy a webcam.

    Step 2: Take webcam apart.

    Step 3: Make a webcam out of parts from step 2.

    A webcam is a lot more electronics than optics, so your high school photography class won't help much here. A lot of the stuff that goes into a webcam is going to be surface mount only and very tiny. I understand you want to learn about them, but you might be better off buying one and taking it apart and studying that.

  • Best you can do is play with a primative one... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 ) * on Monday July 12, 2004 @01:23AM (#9672028) Homepage Journal
    ...like this guy [geocities.com]. You can't get much closer to making your own webcam than this. It's not like you can print a CMOS Image Sensor from your bubblejet.

  • Components, and idea. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Xepo ( 69222 ) on Monday July 12, 2004 @01:33AM (#9672069) Homepage
    It'd be quite difficult to make a digital web cam. Sure, basic photography is simple. The reason? All you need to do is capture the light, and you've got a nice chemical compound that does that fine. You don't have to delve into the actual process of getting it to capture (yea you have to develop it, but the chemical compound on the film does the capturing).

    With anything digital, you have to use a matrix of photo-sensitive sensors, process, and send them out to the computer. Which means you either need to buy a CMOS board, or that other kind of photographic digital thing. Figure out how it interfaces, connect a USB interfacing chip onto it (I think they're pretty cheap, Buffer->USB->Program, you handle the arrows and the Program, everything else you'd practically have to buy. I guess you could create the USB interfacing yourself, but that would be tedious, and not important. Using the serial or parallel ports would be easier if you're going to do it yourself, btw.)

    Anyway, what another poster said. Go buy a cheap rebate webcam, take it apart, play with the parts some, and put it back together. I'm pretty sure there's nothing that's going to be hurt by light or by touching in a webcam (though not positive, IANADigiPhotgrapher).

    This post is getting kinda long, but I wanna share this. I had this idea on a way to make a cheap, possibly portable, digital camera....well, not film camera at least. I'd take three photodiodes (diodes that block when there's light, and don't block when there's not), put the three primary color filters over them, have the light coming in through a slit, and hitting two mirrors, then going to the photodiodes. When you hit the button to take the photo, it rotates the first mirror horizontally, back and forth, as fast as possible, and the second mirror slowly scans down. The output from the photodiodes would directly going to a cassette tape. Later, I could read the cassette tape on my computer, and write a program to analyze it and extract the picture. I thought it was neat because the parts were cheap, but highly impractical. Especially considering it'd take about a second to take the picture with standard photodiodes (~25ns per reading, IIRC). Anything longer than 1/15th of a second *requires* a tripod...imagine the shaking going on with the motors as well.

    Anyway, yea, happy learning and stuff.
    • FTDI do a couple of nice USB interface chips. One can be used as a drop in replacement for an RS232 tranceiver. The other has an 8-bit parallel input.

      Drivers are already in the Linux kernel as well :)

      http://www.ftdichip.com

      Cheers,

      Roger

    • It would be easier to use a pair of spinning mirrors. No acceleration/deceleration to deal with, fewer parts, less shaking and less energy.

      I wanted to set something like this up for painting images with lasers. The mirrors would just repeatedly paint a pattern and the laser could be interrupted with something fast and cheap, like a liquid crystal thinggie.

      I never thought of using it for photography though... except maybe scanning objects in 3D by triangulating the reflection... using the known direct

  • Cool trick I saw once (Score:5, Interesting)

    by itwerx ( 165526 ) on Monday July 12, 2004 @01:35AM (#9672078) Homepage
    A normal memory chip is actually light sensitive, in a nasty gray-scale sort of way.
    So, take an old memory chip, like a 1-meg or so. Carefully split the top off of it (might take a half-dozen tries to get one with pins still intact after).
    The one I saw was plugged directly into a memory card. These days you'd probably have to rig up a parallel port interface.
    Then all you do is put a lens over it for focus (watch out for the sun! :) and write consistent values out (all ones or zeroes) then display what you read back in.

    • Re:Cool trick I saw once (Score:3, Informative)

      by oojah ( 113006 )
      It's worth pointing out that *any* silicon chip is light sensitive. The advantage of the memory chip is that it has a large array of identical components which are effectively your pixels.

      When you are making light sensitive devices on a CMOS process (rather than a CCD) you will often use photodiodes. A diode is just a pn junction so, strictly speaking, a photodiode is a diode that is exposed to light.

      I make camera chips on CMOS chips and we have to use the top metal layer to shield everything apart from t
    • I remember seeing this in one of the old DIY robot books from TAB Publishing. I believe the author referred to it as a 'Ramera' and actually goes through the steps to disassemble a chip. While this approach would work to some degree, the images that are captured aren't very pretty.

  • you can do it!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by michaelbuddy ( 751237 ) on Monday July 12, 2004 @01:36AM (#9672087)
    I know what I have learned back in grade school will apply to this project.

    step 1. get shoe box
    step 2. get needle
    step 3. get charged coupled device CCD
    step 4. make small hole in box
    step 5. put CCD in box.
    Step 6. Connect shoe box to PC
    Step 6. aw crap, go to Circuit city.

  • You can start with an old flatbed scanner (Score:5, Informative)

    by vojtech ( 565680 ) <vojtech@suse.cz> on Monday July 12, 2004 @01:37AM (#9672089)
    Take the linear CCD array from it, add some mechanics, and with some luck you can get nice (in the range of megapixels) images.
    These guys did it already: here [sentex.net] and here [rit.edu]
    Better than a webcam, and pretty good for understanding how digital imaging works.
    • Holy Crap!!!

      I have one of those in my closet.
      Totally awesome.

      I can hook it up to a beat up old Yashica camera. Strap on a zoom lens...

      Oh... Wait... It's slow and doesn't take images non-stop. damn

  • I know this is probably tough if you don't know much about electronics etc... but as a EE in our labs we learned a little about custom programming microprocessors, general electronics etc... If you are interested in webcams, chances are you would also like other digital/electronic toys you might take some EE classes. I know they teach a ton of theory and some practical stuff, however some of our lab classes were golden, like VLSI where we had to design a chip that would be manufactured for us for free(MOSI

  • Unlikely. (Score:3, Informative)

    by nuxx ( 10153 ) on Monday July 12, 2004 @01:45AM (#9672116) Homepage
    A home-made webcam is so far different from the type of pinhole camera that was likely made in school that it's not even funny.

    It's one thing to make a cardboard box which uses some fairly standard physics to project an image on a chemical-coated piece of paper which can then be processed. Everything is big, can be made and handled by hand, etc.

    With a webcam, it's not exactly like you can whip up a CCD, various other ICs, the code to run it, etc. Almost none of this can be done by hand, and it requires a extremely high level of knowledge to do it all. In fact, it's very unlikely that any one person has ever possessed all of the knowledge to make such a device.

    This is like saying "well, since it's not hard to make a simple steam driven piston type engine in a metal shop, why doesn't anyone piece together an electronically controlled fuel injection engine?
    • I'm an occasional reader of "alternative-history" type novels (i.e. 1632 by Eric Flint, Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove) and a recurring theme in those types of books is that when the travelers go back -- no matter what they take with them -- there's no way to skip past levels of technological development.

      In Guns of the South, the 19th century types are amazed at computers and a discussion of how to fix them comes around. As one of the 20th century characters puts it, (from memory) "we don't have th
    • I shall now give a counter argument as to why the original artcle submitter is not so off as you suggest.

      with the pinhole camera, certain assumptions and allowances are made. One does not craft the cardboard. that is given. usually the cardboard box is given as a whole. More importantly, the photo paper is given. the chemicals involved are not mixed fFrom scratch. the paper is prepared, the solvents are readied ... in a sense, the shoebox camera involves almost noone making anything. The student pla
    • I wonder if one could use several CCD or CMOS chips side by side to create a "large format" webcam...

  • DIY webcam (sort of) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by simonmsh ( 796097 ) on Monday July 12, 2004 @01:45AM (#9672117)
    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 [demon.co.uk] 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 [sun.com].
    • 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 [demon.co.uk].

  • CCD Camera Cookbook (Score:5, Interesting)

    by p7 ( 245321 ) on Monday July 12, 2004 @01:47AM (#9672123)
    If your interest is purely academic, you might check out the CCD Camera Cookbook Webpage [willbell.com]. The CCD Camera Cookbook is a book covering the design of two CCD cameras for Astrophotography. The resolution of these cameras is not high, and they do not come out being cheap. I am currently reading the book and will probably build the TC245 camera as a prelude to trying to design my own higher resolution CCD camera for Astrophotography. I think the book alone would be a good start in an attempt to understand CCDs.
    • I have not looked into this for a long time. Other than the obvious advantage of learning something new, can I expect better results than stick my DSLR on my telescope? Or have digital cameras generally surpassed any gain you are going to get with the cooling (if they even still do that)?
      • From reading the website, cooling is still an integral part of the system. I think the CCD camera will pick up darker objects. In one comment they mention using a magnitude 14 star as a guide star in real time (I think they were doing .1 second exposures). I am going to go both routes, as I think both have their advantages.
        • I was under the impression that the more you cooled a CCD, the less noise it produced. This isn't as much of a problem with digital photography in the rest of the world but with the long exposure times of astrophotography it did become a problem. Also there are software packages that help remove the noise from digital images; so I guess these could be adapted for use as well. All in all an interesting time to be into (astro)photography.
  • Don't forget about the home-made pinhole paper camera, the Dirkon [google.com]. Somewhere out there there is a pdf file that you can print on tagboard, cut out, and glue together.

    If you can't find it, or the site gets slashdotted, and you have some bandwidth to spare/share, I'll email you a copy and you can host it. Approx. 416KB.

  • There's always the mechanical option! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by carndearg ( 696084 ) on Monday July 12, 2004 @07:29AM (#9673206) Homepage Journal
    For the ultimate video-from-first-principles webcam, how about a Baird mechanical system?

    This site has quite a few links to people's NBTV projects and software: Narrow-bandwidth Television Association [nbtv.org]

  • For taking stills or moving pictures?

    You might want to research how Radio Amateurs do SSTV (Slow Scan TV) and NBTV (Narrow Band TV) (and how they did it in the days before comuters).

    NBTV uses mechanical equipment similar to Baird's original TV equipment which would be a really interesting project :-)

    Otherwise its playing around with the same components commercial web cams are made from.

    Its also very likely you'll have to write or adapt software...

  • Don't create the cam, create a robot (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Like here: limpens.net [limpens.net]
    Using a plain old sony hi8 camera, hooked up to a video grabber running the famous bt8x8 chipset.
    Nothing fancy, however the camera is able to pan and tilt via the webinterface (also some video-effects can be toggled).

    Check out the apache module, written to interface between the website and the camera software on limpens.net/camera [limpens.net]

    This all works quite good, one 'engine' to grab frames when needed, and an Apache module takes care of supplying the data to all the clients and handles t

  • Not so hard (Score:3, Informative)

    by Pedrito ( 94783 ) on Monday July 12, 2004 @08:19AM (#9673400)
    Everyone keeps talking about how you can't make your own CCD chip. I don't know that that's what the poster intends. There's a lot more to creating a web cam than simply the CCD chip. First of all, you can buy CCD chips from a number of sources. You'd then need the associated logic.

    Actually, a number of Astronomy hobbiests are into doing just this sort of thing because astronomy quality cams are quite expensive. A number of people have used regular web cams for astronomical work, usually with long-exposure modifications to the cams, with a great deal of success.

    A team of French hobbiests created this Genesis [genesis16.net] cam from scratch. It's very impressive and better quality than most of the hobbiest level cameras you can buy since it's based on a very high-resolution and very light-sensitive CCD chip.

    But if you want to create just a basic web cam, there are much cheaper CCD chips. The datasheets will probably give you enough of an idea for how to get started with a project.

  • Check out the CCD camera cookbook (Score:3, Interesting)

    by monopole ( 44023 ) on Monday July 12, 2004 @08:32AM (#9673457)
    The CCD Camera Cookbook provides an excellent overview of the construction of an astronomical camera from scratch. Amateur Telescope Makers (ATMs) do this all the time to obtain high performance cameras with greater sensitivity and dynamic range than conventional webcams and Digital Cameras. Such designs not only incorporate superior ADCs but often have such features as peltier coolers.

    I can still rememmber when the first reply to a problem involving hardware was, 'yes we can build it!' Now the bulk of supposed 'hackers' reply that you have to go out and buy whatever you need.
  • Have a look here [extremetech.com]

    This should give you a fair idea about CMOS, Image sensors, how colour is created etc... that should be a good starting point
  • You'd pop the cover off it. Sampling the memory would get you a primitive black and white image. Maybe even grayscale, with software trickery. A parallel port interface isn't out of the question, would be as simple as an electronic camera could be, I'd suppose... look it up on google, used to be in a bunch of amateur robotics books of the 1980s.
    • Use three of these, a prism, and three filters (one each red, green, and blue). Recombining the images from these into a color image is cake.
    • In a certain book called "Android Design", by Martin Bradley Weinstein, this DRAM chip camera design was known as the "RAMERA" system, IIRC. He gave enough info to build it, but I think it was originally referenced in an old Ciarcia's Celler book or magazine from the period (early 1980's)...
  • Seriously stop this insanity now. If you want to make a homebrew webcam then you really should thing about how "homebrew" you really want to go. If you go out and buy a CCD and all the chips necessary then you really aren't doing anything more than some solder work and if you don't have some sort of specialized interface chip then you will probably be doing a lot of coding work. I mean you can't make a webcam without interfacing with a PC, and that requires drivers to handle actually getting the image fr

  • Depends how serious you are... (Score:3, Informative)

    by oojah ( 113006 ) on Monday July 12, 2004 @09:48AM (#9674057) Homepage

    Lots of people are saying you can't build the chip yourself. That's not exactly true.

    Go through CMP [cmp.imag.fr] and you can get say the AMS [austriamicrosystems.com] C35B4C3, a 0.35um 4 metal, 2 poly CMOS process, for 650 Euro/mm2. I'm sure lots of people will cringe at the 0.35um, saying that it is ancient. Well, maybe in digital terms, but it is quite nice for analogue/mixed chips imo. 0.8um is still around (290 euro/mm2)!

    Alternatively, if you are part of an Educational Institution or Research Laboratory, how about the ST Microlelectronics 0.18um CMOS process for 990 euro/mm2?

    Now get hold of a copy of Electric [gnu.org] some spice or other and learn how to design design electronic circuits. geda [seul.org] may also be of interest.

    That last step might take a while.

    Design your chip, submit it to CMP, wait three or four months and you'll get it back. Now go on to do what the other comments are talking about with pin hole cameras etc.

    Let's do a rough price breakdown. Suppose you want VGA (640x480) in grey scale. Let's also suppose you can get your pixel element down to 5um*5um (which would be quite small imho). This gives:

    Width: 640*5um + 2*400um = 4mm

    Height: 480*5um + 2*400um = 3.2mm

    The 400um gaps are for the pads on each side. This doesn't include any other electronics, so let's just say it is 4mm*4mm = 16mm2.

    You need packaging as well and are probably limited to JLCC packages because it needs to be exposed to the light. Let's assume a JLCC68 package. You get 20 chips back and each package costs 48 euro.

    So, 16*650 + 20*48 = 11360 euro. Put another way, 568 euro per chip. Don't forget to add VAT if you pay it. For the UK, this means 9343 or 476/chip.

    Now consider that 16mm2 is still a small chip (and colour would be at least 3 times larger). If you have access to a webcam and can get inside it to look at the light sensitive area, measure it and figure out how much it would cost!

    Cheers,

    Roger

  • I don't think a true do-it-yourself webcam is a possibility these days, any more than making your own chip. But there are a lot of entertaining things you could do with the optics. For starters, replace the lens with a pinhole. You might be able to get a really wide-angle view that way, with minimum geometrical distortion. (Or, then again, you might not).

    Go buy a pair of, say, 2-diopter reading glasses at a drugstore. Replace the webcam's lens with a tube about 500 mm long and the reading glass lens at the

  • Build your own photosesitive element (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dutky ( 20510 ) on Monday July 12, 2004 @10:17AM (#9674321) Homepage Journal
    While a number of folks have mentioned buying a CCD directly, uncapping a DRAM for use as a crude CCD, or even building a scanning image sensor with mirrors, galvos and photodiodes. Buying the CCD outright or uncapping a DRAM seem like cheating to me, and the physical scanning solution just sounds too complicated (moving parts, yuck). The obvious solution, to my mind, is simply to build a small array of photo-diodes/resistors/transistors and scan the array with a couple of demultiplexors and counters (or a microcontroller).

    The sensor array will be a bit tedious to construct (especially if you want more than a trivial number of pixels), the response time may be slow (ISTR some photoresistors haveing recovery times in the multi-second range), and you may need to spend some real cash for peripheral equipment (if you are going to build the thing using a microcontroller, you will need something to burn the MCU's program with, which will run you at least US$100). On the upside, you can build a true greyscale device (if you use a ADC to sample the pixel photodiode/photoresistor pixels).

    The resulting camera will be bulky, slow, and have absolutely terrible resolution (we're talking 1 Kpixel, tops), but, if you have a spare month or two, it sounds like a fun project.

    • Ditto.

      Get a bunch of photoresistors from a electronic supply store and build a small, say 4x4, array of them and experiment with ways to get that into a parallel TTL interface. Hook it up to your parallel port, or maybe even a Cypress USB dev kit which you can program dynamically via the USB firmware loader.

      I believe you can also use LEDs as detectors, which would allow you to use an old LED matrix from an LED sign as a nice big array. A small array could also make a nice optical mouse.

      Once that's done
    • There was an article in Hobby Electronic about twenty years ago, that described how to drill holes in an old LP in a spiral pattern to make a Nipkow disc scanner, as used in the original Baird Televisor systems.

      As each hole passes the light sensor, you get a "scan line" from the image. It's curved, and it tapers into the middle, but you can get very recognisable pictures with around 60 or 70 scan lines. This involves drilling *lots* of holes though.

      For these purposes, you could drill timing holes at the

  • 10x10 Array (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pabtro ( 609586 )

    1. Get 100, equal webcams
    2. Put in an array of 10x10
    3. Feed input to several computers (USB)
    4. Apply respective parallel image processing, including mosaic techniques that will get rid of overlap
    5. Feed resulting data to a single computer
    6. Play with the resulting ~30 Mpixel image.

    Don't forget to point it to the sky. You may arrange things so you have complete sky coverage, then track aircraft and meteors. Adjust software accordingly.
    • 7. Play also with the potential 3D scene that you can generate, including accurate distance measuring, between all elements of the captured scene :)
  • after my first 3d experience was published in 2600 I decided to further the sport. Myself and a friend mounted two cameras side by side, and with a custom modded spca50x driver (had to add these cameras since they weren't supported by default) we could record left eye/right eye. Then we run them through a couple quick ImageMagick filters and mencode, and the result? 3d webcam video. Check it out: here [sixbit.org].

Slashdot Top Deals

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Close