Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Old Webcams? 258
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."
Get permission first (Score:3, Interesting)
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He never said, or even implied, they would be taken off school property.
I have had plenty of old unused equipment that is surplus. Plenty of times I have used them in my own little projects at work to try out an idea or something cool. If companies are willing to pay for you to take classes outside of work to increase your skill sets, why would they object to you using equipment not currently allocated to anything to do the same?
At this moment I have a test VM server on my desk from an used system. Using
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That's a great idea. If part of your bucket list is being some guy's prison wife.
I knew a kid in real life that pulled it off. Was with me in Military school... wonder why?
Never tried him as an adult, but he got in plenty of trouble and his parents were sued... by hundreds of families.
Set up the system to record the girls locker room and had an IR remote to turn it off and on to save on VHS tape (this was quite some time ago). Used an editing rig to create a "best of" collection and sold it for thousands
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set up the system to record the girls locker room
Pics or it didn't happen.
Really, if it did, copies would have survived and be on the web forever after.
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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).
If he wants them, he will surely get them. When I worked for Yuba College I just talked to the people running the surplus sale and they set everything I wanted aside for me.
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Re:Get permission first (Score:4, Insightful)
...if they needed a password reset, their manager had to also be verified and approve them having their password reset. Stupidest policy ever.
Where I work, as soon as we (IT) even hears a rumor that an employee has been canned, we change the password on their account; we don't delete the account until the employee's manager gives us the okay. In an environment like that, having a manager request the password reset makes complete sense, because the last thing you want is a newly fired employee calling you to reset his password so he can sabotage and/or steal confidential data.
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Except that at this company as soon as the manager decides to fire them (before the employee has even been notified that they've been canned), their account is disabled by HR and the service desk does not have the ability to enable those accounts.
It's a huge waste of company resources to keep harassing a manager every time some idiot forgets their password over the weekend.
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Except that at this company as soon as the manager decides to fire them (before the employee has even been notified that they've been canned), their account is disabled by HR and the service desk does not have the ability to enable those accounts.
In which case, yeah, I agree -- that's a pretty stupid policy.
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...if they needed a password reset, their manager had to also be verified and approve them having their password reset. Stupidest policy ever.
Where I work, as soon as we (IT) even hears a rumor that an employee has been canned, we change the password on their account; we don't delete the account until the employee's manager gives us the okay. In an environment like that, having a manager request the password reset makes complete sense, because the last thing you want is a newly fired employee calling you to reset his password so he can sabotage and/or steal confidential data.
I work hard to identify colleagues with this sort of attitude in the work place because I know they're only looking out for themselves, they don't have anyone else's back, can't be trusted and should be ostracised. Basically, what you are saying is, they are not working to process and applying their own value system, i.e. their prejudices, to the powers they have been entrusted with in an Information Technology department.
If a colleague in my team demonstrated that behavior I would be wary for finger poin
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Multi-touch cabinet (Score:3, Interesting)
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I did a project a while back for a course using something similar.
After removing the IR filter and replacing it with a visible light filter (you can just use a piece of fully exposed photographic film) I used some filed down IR LEDs (filed down to distribute the light more evenly in all directions) and used a graphical programming app called vvvv [vvvv.org] to do blob detection on the LEDs (I believe the blob detection plugin itself is open source).
After you have the locations of the LEDS you can estimate locations in
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Not expensive! Visit your local theater supply store and buy 1 sheet each of Congo Blue and Medium Red lighting gels... the sheets are like 10"x20" and you cut little squares less than 1/4", stack the two together, and you have an IR pass filter (filters out visible light, just allowing infrared through)
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Here's more info:
http://sethsandler.com/multitouch/mtmini/ [sethsandler.com]
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Make one of these... (Score:2)
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Better yet, hook them all up to a big helium balloon.
Mount 36 of them in a ball (Score:5, Funny)
Mount 36 of them in a ball, and then throw them up in the air!
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Someone just did [slashdot.org] exactly that.
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Bullet time! (Score:5, Interesting)
Get some USB hubs and make your own bullet-time setup.
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Clap your hands. Align in movie editor software.
Throwable 45-Camera Ball Takes Spherical Panoramas (Score:2)
Top that German project a few articles ago.
Hmmm . . . let's take a retrospective on the /. stories on German technology this week . . . a government spyware Trojan . . . wireless controlled bicycle brakes . . . and the throwable panorama ball. Put that all together . . . and you get . . . ?
I'm not sure yet, but we should keep a sharp eye on this tech coming out of Germany. They are definitely up to something.
True RNG (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Don't publicise this (Score:3)
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.
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Can you tell me what the hell you are talking about? It sounds really cool, but I don't know what search terms to put into Google to start researching it :)
Try "Geiger Counter" and "CCD" (Score:2)
Try "Geiger Counter" and "CCD"
Radioactivity has a tendency to kick electrons around. If a particularly strong particle hits the CCD array, it will be registered on whichever pixel cell it hit. You can see this as a pixel going "white" for a brief moment on the video stream.
Put an alpha source next to a CCD array (which is otherwise light-tight) and you will get random white-pixel flashes. These are truly random, not the result of a PRNG.
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For the most part, quantum-level action is random. Positions of electrons in atoms are the big one, which is probabilistically random (and true randomness can come from that if used carefully).
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Mod Parent Funny! Had me laughing out loud spontaneously.
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Can you tell me what the hell you are talking about? It sounds really cool, but I don't know what search terms to put into Google to start researching it :)
Try "americium" and "webcam."
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Bullet Time for a Videography class (Score:2)
Real suggestions (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
More suggestions (Score:3)
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 detec
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This gets really *really* interesting if you can do this for a raptor nest,
I'm sure!
such as a hawk.
Ah, I see we weren't thinking along the same lines at all. Never mind...
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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.
That's not the kind of "chicks" that school IT admins record.
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I'm sure school administration will approve to finding hidden cameras in bushes around the playground...
Why Do You Have Them In The First Place? (Score:2)
Telephoto (Score:2)
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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.
Bullet time? (Score:2)
I remember the old Matrix documentary where they did the Bullet-Time effect by setting up something like the number of cameras you have in an arc and having them all take a picture of the focal point simultaneously. I think they then played the images back in sequence.
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XKCD or IR (Score:2)
Suggestion one: if your school has a football field, try implementing something like XKCD suggests. Who knows, maybe the kids will learn some perspective.
Suggestion two: convert them to near-infrared imaging, and let the physics teachers and the art club go nuts with them.
use as door gifts (Score:2)
Use them at door gifts if you setup at any job fairs for local colleges etc. That's what a lot of departments at Penn state do
Camera Array for fast imaging or Lightfield Camera (Score:4, Interesting)
Build a camera array similar to what Stanford has done (see http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/ [stanford.edu] ) for fast imaging, or building a camera array to refocus images after the fact (see http://lightfield.stanford.edu/ [stanford.edu] ).
Otherwise, you could do your own "bullet-time" live spin-around imaging system by placing them around a circular room.
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When I saw the camera array focus through the bushes behind their subject... I was hooked. However I didn't have the budget, so I started experimenting with 1 camera and many shots from a small area... if you have stationary subjects, you can do the refocusing with a single camera and a lot of time....
Here are some photos of Chicago in synthetic focus [flickr.com] as an example.
I would love to be able to build a portable 64 camera array.
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Same with me, but I haven't had the time to experiment. Thanks a lot for the link!
gigacam (Score:2)
This requires lots of work---
1. design a mount so that all 45 of the cameras can be pointed in exactly the same direction in a fixed array, say, 9 x 5, with exactly the same distance between each.
2. design a means to trigger and capture images simultaneously from all 45 cameras.
3. design a means to stitch together all 45 images that takes advantage of overlapping areas to increase resolution
So does this one ----
1. lay the 45 cameras out in a line, all pointing in the same direction, slightly upward
2. arrang
Science (Score:2)
Why reading the article is useful... (Score:2)
(Yes, I know this is Slashdot).
The cameras in question are USB 2.0 based devices, so that defines what's practical here by the USB standard. For example, if the project is worth about $29 US per camera, then cameras can each be located about 100-150 feet away from a PC, using CAT 5 based extensions to USB. If you can't raise about that much money for the project, it's out - for example mounting cameras near raptor's nests that may be 50-80 feet off the ground is probably only going to be feasible even with
Budget Hockney? (Score:2)
Hmmm... If you're artistic, how about a budget version of David Hockney's latest experimentation [technologyreview.com].
A Neutrino Detector (Score:3)
Put them around 5 gallons of dry cleaning solvent, and make a Cerenkov neutrino detector.
Contest (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Roverbot (Score:2)
some ideas... (Score:2)
1.) set up cameras in this year's halloween haunted house (assuming your school does that). Get some of the kids to splice recordings from Oct 31 into a montage of "funny memories".
2.) Make "observation boxes" for who ever can come up with a reason to use them. Figure 5-6 cameras a box, with decent lighting. It might be useful for some biology/chemistry experiments...or just an ant farm.
3.) Place cameras up outside near where the kids are picked up/dropped off. Basically, when ever a kid leaves the campus y
Nest Cam (Score:2)
Set it up so that there are a couple webcams with external views, and maybe even one peaking into the box so if you get lucky the students can see it roosting.
My university (UMass Lowell) did this recently with and it was pretty cool to see the Peregrine Falcons up close.
First thing that comes to mind is... (Score:2)
Put all of them up on some old shelving, and serve cake [g4tv.com].
Old... web cams? (Score:2)
Send them to me (Score:2)
Send them to me, I'll figure something out.
Ok... (Score:2)
Seriously... (Score:2)
There are a lot of other fun things you can do - like recording a sports game from "all possible" angles and then use the videos as a raw data for a film with the best moments.
Record the game, then let a few groups of students come up with one video each of five minutes each from what they think was the best video moments and then see how different the videos are.
You are of course not limited to sports events, you can actually use other kinds of events too.
And making a stereoscopic video (3D-video) would a
CCTV (Score:2)
Zoneminder [zoneminder.com] works well... warning though, you'll need something with lots of cores and lots of RAM. Oh, almost forgot to mention, it's free (as in beer) and open source.
Why you do that? (Score:2)
That's a serious question, why you replace 45 perfectly good working cameras with new cameras? If they were broken, then you wouldn't ask what do to with them. It's not like the quality of web-cameras matters, or that the cameras get worse with time. That's like you decide to throw away 2000$ for no reason at all.
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You're making perfect cents, but...this is America!
random number generator (Score:2)
You can create a pretty cool random number generator with a webcam and a smoke detector:
http://slashdot.org/story/06/08/13/1311238/diy-random-number-generator [slashdot.org]
High-speed video capture array (Score:2)
You could create an array of cameras to capture highspeed video [google.com]
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If it's high school, then why would it be wrong to be attracted to them?
People often have trouble differentiating illegal from immoral (yes, I realize that spying on someone without their knowledge or consent can be both regardless of age and that simply being attracted to >18s isn't what's illegal, don't get in the way of a good rant with facts...).
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Beware, end sequence of the clip reads: "Patent pending".
He probably would not be selling the device... so I don't see what the patent holder would be coming after him for.
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File a different design patent using more cameras than stated and maybe a few more things added to really differentiate it. Problem solved.
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... a patent provides the right to exclude others[14] from making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the patented invention for the term of the patent...
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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.
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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)
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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 poin
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Prefect
Ford? Don't panic!
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Throw them out, man. Seriously. It is good for the soul.
While you 're at it, empty your basement too.
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Yeah... buts let's face it. If it is going to be truly informative we all have to admit that the average Slashdotter would only benefit from 1-3 of those camera angles maximum anyways.
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MOD PARENT REDUNDANT
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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.
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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.
I
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You know that thing out of the matrix where all the frames are taken simultaneously but dispersed along the path you want the viewpoint to take when the frames are played sequentially as a video. Maybe bolt onto a frame, or stick around the inside of a room with velcro.
Actually, I was remembering that kid on YouTube a bunch of years back that took a video of him showing his "mad skills" with a light saber.
That would have been even more awesome in bullet time.
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