Making a Homemade Webcam? 73
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?"
"gurus" (Score:3, Funny)
Re: Well, Somebody had to do it. (Score:3, Informative)
Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.
Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody's job.
Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it.
It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.
Re: Well, Somebody had to do it. (Score:2)
Looks like Somebody did do what Nobody should have and Everybody complains about!
Re: Well, Somebody had to do it. (Score:2)
apostrophe (Score:2)
Obviously, not to the desired effect.
Re:"gurus" (Score:1)
Re:"gurus" (Score:2)
Here's a usenet group [google.com] for you.
Re:"gurus" (Score:2)
Video camera plus TV-in card? (Score:4, Informative)
homemade webcam (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Oh, guys, it is not 'Funny', it is 'Insightful'! (Score:4, Funny)
Paul B.
Re:Oh, guys, it is not 'Funny', it is 'Insightful' (Score:2)
IT DOESN'T? Crap! Now I know where I've been going wrong!
Re:Oh, guys, it is not 'Funny', it is 'Insightful' (Score:2)
Disclaimer: I hit the karma kap not long after it was first implemented and so you might consider there to be a bit of hypocrisy up above, if you're that sort of person.
Re:Oh, guys, it is not 'Funny', it is 'Insightful' (Score:2)
Me too, but maybe that guy who posted the original comment have not yet!
Paul B.
Re:Oh, guys, it is not 'Funny', it is 'Insightful' (Score:2)
Re:Oh, guys, it is not 'Funny', it is 'Insightful' (Score:2)
Paul B.
Re:homemade webcam (Score:2)
Step 1: Think of a problem already solved to do a task trivially and inexpensively
Step 2: Think to oneself "I could be geekier if I spent less money than the inexpensive already solved technology by doing it myself with free/cheap parts while expending much effort"
Step 3: Do nothing (noop)
Step 4: Post to ask.slashdot.org
I mean, 99.9% of all ask.slashdot.org posts can be solved by typing a couple keywords into google [google.com].
I can't tell you how many times I've karma whored o
Best you can do is play with a primative one... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Best you can do is play with a primative one... (Score:3, Informative)
Try Google's cache [66.102.7.104] of it.
Re:Best you can do is play with a primative one... (Score:1)
Re:Best you can do is play with a primative one... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was even able to walk across the room with bluetooth.
Components, and idea. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Components, and idea. (Score:2)
Drivers are already in the Linux kernel as well
http://www.ftdichip.com
Cheers,
Roger
Re:Components, and idea. (Score:2)
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)
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!
Re:Cool trick I saw once (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Cool trick I saw once (Score:1)
you can do it!! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:you can do it!! - Someone has to do it (Score:2)
Step 8. Profit
You can start with an old flatbed scanner (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Kodak picture scanner (Score:1)
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
Hobbyist and Electrical engineering. (Score:1)
Unlikely. (Score:3, Informative)
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?
Re:Unlikely. (Score:2)
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
Re:Unlikely. (Score:2)
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
Re:Unlikely. (Score:2)
DIY webcam (sort of) (Score:3, Interesting)
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].
Re:DIY webcam (sort of) (Score:1)
- 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)
Re:CCD Camera Cookbook (Score:2)
Re:CCD Camera Cookbook (Score:2)
Re:CCD Camera Cookbook (Score:2)
Home-made paper camera (Score:2)
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.
Re:Home-made paper camera (Score:2)
Oh and they really do work!
There's always the mechanical option! (Score:4, Interesting)
This site has quite a few links to people's NBTV projects and software: Narrow-bandwidth Television Association [nbtv.org]
What do you want to do with it? (Score:1)
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)
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)
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)
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.
Anatomy of a digital camera (Score:2)
This should give you a fair idea about CMOS, Image sensors, how colour is created etc... that should be a good starting point
Old DRAM chips... (Score:2)
Re:Old DRAM chips... (Score:2)
Re:Old DRAM chips... (Score:2)
Re:Old DRAM chips... (Score:2)
Oh Dear Goodness (Score:1)
Depends how serious you are... (Score:3, Informative)
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
Modify the optics. A pinhole webcam? (Score:2)
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)
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.
Re:Build your own photosesitive element (Score:2)
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
Nipkow Disc... (Score:2)
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)
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.
Re:10x10 Array (Score:1)
DIY 3D webcamming (Score:1)