arduino, robots, cameras, and life

I have a Hp mini netbook, an xbox, a canon 7D dslr, a canon powershot point and shoot camera and an iphone.
The netbook is a hackintosh.
The xbox has a mod chip so it can act as a media server.
The powershot is running CHDK which enables an intervalometer and motion detection.
The iPhone is jailbroken so I can run non “approved” apps on it.
I paid full price for all of those devices and I haven’t caused any direct monetary loss for the producers of those devices. I consider that a win-win situation. The hardware manufacturer makes good hardware, and then I am able to do something with it that was not initially considered by the manufacturer. I paid for it, I should be able to modify it.

When I bought the 7D I knew that there was a ‘hacking’ effort underway and I was looking forward to some day when it would bear fruit. I have checked in every few months since then and I finally realized that instead of bearing fruit, Canon has killed the tree. With each consecutive firmware update, canon has locked the hardware down more and more. They have made it harder to develop for and now it is at the point where development has stopped. How does this help canon sell even one more camera?

I honestly don’t expect them to go out of their way to help us hack their hardware. I do expect them to help their bottom line by making innovative hardware cheaply, and making it as flexible as possible so that huge numbers of people buy it. Their continued efforts to encrypt and lock down the firmware on their cameras confuses me because their cameras still have a lot of flaws. The time that their programmers and engineers put into “locking the gates” could have been spent adding audio levels, reducing shutter effects, or enabling a record time greater than 12 minutes! As a law abiding purchaser of their hardware I am really offended. I am offended that they went on the attack instead of graciously acknowledging that their cameras are the focus of some innovative creative people. I am also saddened because I can not think of a way that it is good for the company, or the consumer, or the industry. This seems like equal parts greed and ignorance.

If you understand why they do this, I would love to hear it. If not, then I’m sure canon would love to hear it.

Public Relations Department
Corporate Communications Division
One Canon Plaza
Lake Success, NY 11042
E-mail: pr@cusa.canon.com

I really like the motor shield from adafruit industries. It is simple and it allows me to plug it in and start playing quickly. I usually have giant machines in my head, and the shield just wasn’t designed for those kind of motors.
You aren’t going to end up running your prius off of one of these controllers, but it turns out that you can almost double the max motor current draw just by soldering on some chips.
From Adafruit’s forums I figured out what ic’s I need to order (L293). Here is the label on the esd bag.

Now all that you need to do is solder them on top of the existing motor driver chips! As strange as it sounds, the theory has been vetted. Each one of those drivers can handle 600mA continuous. By stacking one on top of another they each handle ~600mA and you end up with ~1200mA! The motor shield has two driver ICs mounted on it, they are the two outer ones.

Here is a shot of the board. It is assembled, but it only has one motor driver chip per channel (‘channel’ feels weird there, but you know what I mean)

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I just got back from the Sparkfun AVC. It was a blast! I shot a lot of video, but that will take a while to get processed edited and uploaded. In the meantime here are the things I thought were cool on the ‘factory tour’ with a few AVC shots thrown in.

This pond instill fear in a lot of AVC owner/operators. Strangely enough the airborne division didn’t seem to mind the water as much as the trees.

This lil guy broke down the day before the big race. Sigh. It’s not easy being autonomous.

Known for it’s blazing speed, Bluebot held it’s own. It eventually claimed first place in the DNF division!

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The other night I was out filming traffic. I ended up getting a really weird camera artifact. It looks like a dark bar that rolls through the shot from bottom to top. At first it made me freak out a bit, thinking that the camera was somehow broken. I eventually figured out that it is the result of A) a flickering light source and B) the right (wrong) shutter speed. I think the streetlights were tungsten bulbs, but they may have been HID bulbs. Whatever they were they definitely had a flicker to them.

I read somewhere that ideally you should shoot a shutter speed that is double the frame rate. This gives you a 180 degree shutter and it should look very similar to film. The way that I made these bars appear was by changing the shutter speed away from 1/125 when I was shooting 720p60. I have ideas as to why this creates the banding, but they are all theories. If you have any more insight pleas tell me in the comments!
Moral of the story: keep the shutter speed at twice the frames per second. Change the aperture, or buy a faster lens!

There were a few different stages of excitement that I went through after getting my Canon 7d. First I played around with all of my manual nikon lenses (using an adapter of course). Next I marveled at the settings and the live view feature. Finally I decided I wanted to go out and shoot some slow motion video. This is fairly easy to do seeing as the camera shoots both 720p and ntsc at 60 frames a second. The software side of slowing things down required some thinking, but it’s easy once you get the hang of it.

Here is what I (and the wisdom of the internet) have come up with.

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