arduino, robots, cameras, and life

Seeing as how I am constantly inundated by media requests – I figured I would use my podium here to ask the readers a few questions. I look at it as distributed googling really, and hopefully finding some vetted answers in the sea of confusion that is out there.

1) has anyone used CHDK here? It is a modified firmware for certain cameras, and seemingly it allows you to get very low level access to the camera. With it you can enable time lapse mode, Raw shooting, video, motion detection, and I think they are working on time travel. This seems like an amazing project. Does anyone have any success with it? Does anyone have any recommendations on cameras? Im kind of looking at the SD1100 and the SD600.

and lastly, does anyone have any recommendations on where to find said camera cheaply? I’m running dd-wrt on my home router and have a hacked xbox, so this seems like it is within my reach, just looking for people with experience in it.

chdk interface

2) does anyone know of any good anti flicker plugins for after effects (or anything else (on a mac)) that will remove the frame-to-frame luminance variations of a dslr time lapse?

3) does anyone know why frame-to-frame luminance variations happen on my d40 running in complete darkness with a manual lens and a flash?

4) does anyone know of a good guide to moving an arduino project towards a mass producible item? Lets say I would like to make a one board version of my arduino rss reader – how would I go about doing that?

breadboard arduino

5) How much does the average human heart weigh?

6) Does anyone know of a comparison between the online stock video sites from a submitter’s perspective? Does anyone have experience with any specific sites? (feel free to email me if you would rather not post publicly – “r” at this domain, no prefix.)

7) Enough about me – Why are you here? What kinds of projects brought you here, and what kinds of projects would you like to see here?

Thanks for your time, and hopefully your answers!

This is a task I don’t like doing, but it is certainly useful if you have a lot of footage to sort through and not everyone is very technically inclined. It allows you to print a contact sheet from every x frames/seconds/minutes of a video file. That helps when you are looking for a specific shot in a bunch of reels, and it helps to very quickly show an art director what the footage you have looks like.

You’ll need either Quicktime or FCP, and Photoshop for this.

1) open your video file

2a) in quicktime hit export / movie to image sequence. Select “advanced options” and put in a frames per second number. If you put in 1 then you will still end up with 60 frames per minute! Luckily Quicktime will let us deal with decimals here. A value of .016 will give you around one frame per minute and usually works out well.

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I’ve been inspired to shoot more pictures lately. Like everything else in my life I tend to go for quantity over quality, so I shot a LOT of pictures. I acquired a battery/intervalometer for my Nikon D40 a while back and didn’t even notice the intervalometer settings until recently.

I’ve shot quite a few tests with it and I’ll post them below. The first was clouds through my kitchen window.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QwlmFD_iQk&feature=channel[/youtube]
The second was more clouds from the roof at my work.

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Here are some recent tests I did with vector line effects in After Effects.
This first one is from a tutorial I found by bill O’neil on the creative cow site using the shine plugin.

This is the simplest one, cloning out the tracing effect once I liked it, and tweaking to add depth.

This one adds a camera move spinning the logo.

This one uses camera moves through the logo.