Building Tables Body Frame

Ola, only two weeks left until graduate exhibition (28th of July)

This weekend has been all about building the body and i believe it will take another two days to finish the setup to a presentable piece.

I’ve decided to go aluminium profiles for the main frame and it turned out quite good.  Have look:

Obviously all the inside installations have to be sorted out now, which are slightly more difficult to create. Especially the mirrors are giving me head aches for two reasons:

1. I still didn’t manage to make my own first surface mirrors of correct measurements. (Have another glass mirror and still some acrylic off cuts left overs from last time at home, which I will try out today. Also bought a  paint stripper that is less strong than the one before. Will post my results tonight. Hope it works.)

2. Instaling them in a way that their angle can be adjusted easily. (Here I was thinking of utilizing some kind of a radius hinge. I’ll be checking out a speciality fasteners manufacturer tomorrow in Alexandria. Apparently they carry that kind of stuff.)

Cheers

Gabor

Filed under: Hardware

First Surface Mirror Results 1

Ola. Trying to get the color coat of the back of these mirrors is pretty difficult. That paint stripper works way to well and applying it for three seconds is probably enough. Anything longer than that will make the paint stripper eat through the reflecting process. On the far right is my best result so far. Got to go on practicing, before spoiling a $50 mirror. :s

mfg Gabor

Filed under: Hardware

First Surface Mirror

I’ve been out to buy an acrylic mirror sheet of 300x400mm.

Still have to make a first surface out of it, practicing on off cuts with paint stripper. That paint stripper is nasty stuff  :s

Hope it works.

Filed under: Hardware

IFire OEM Board Cam results

Here are the results 🙂

Looks great.

Filed under: Hardware

Here are the test results!

Woooow! I haven’t had a clue of how much these two items would improve my setup. There’s literally NO interferance of any wavelength above the visible spectrum with my setup what so ever. I mean nothing at all! The latest version of Community Core Vision does the rest. One now has options available like min. and max. blobSize, image threshold and movement threshold, that let you tweak precisely as, bru. Can’t wait to get back coding. I call it a day…cheers Gabor

Filed under: Hardware

Omega Bob delivered Hot Mirror & 880nm BandPass Filter

Yay! This is fantastic. OmegaBob, a guy with a very well sorted online shop on eBay, takes less time to send me items from the States to Sydney, than it takes my local shop to organize inkjet cartridges for my printer. So…I will test it straight away and post results. Stay tuned 😉

MFG Gabor

Filed under: Hardware

2 Weeks later

Two weeks later and not much to show, when it comes to the actual application. Uni keeps me busy and to satisfy my teachers, I’ve decided to fully concentrate on all the other assignments first, that are still blocking my way. There’s something though, that will keep me cheered up:

I’ve bought the following:

– A 880nm bandpass filter (right dimensions to fit my camera lens)

– A Unibrain Firewire iBoard Camera

This beautiful piece is an industrial OEM board camera, that is supposed to help me eliminating the problem of a low and automatically adjusted  frame rate I have to put with right now. It shoots up to 30 frames per second and sends the data through a Fire Wire cable. Can’t wait to test it out…should arrive by the end of the coming week.

– An Optical Filter or so called “Hot Mirror”, which i will place in front of my projector lens to reduce the “Hot Spot” on my projection surface. The projector still gives me some trouble for it also emits IR and NIR wavelength, which interferes with my setup by creating additional blobs and therefor makes my application become unpredictable. This filter will reduce this effect drastically (i hope) and improve my tracking.

Filed under: Hardware

Projector – Taxan U6 -132

I’m currently experimenting with a new projector. The TAXAN U6-132.

My school has been so friendly to lend it to me to improve my setup, since budget is low.

The projector is a discontinued product from the TAXAN’s range but does a way, way, way better job than my old hp portable data projector.

The brightness does much of a difference to the colors projected, even if this could be probably improved further by utilizing a grey shaded projection plane instead of the drafting vellum I’m using so far…but that comes at its cost 😉 The higher resolution is also a benefit, but what fascinates me the most is the incredible difference in video delay. Even though I’m still working with a Logitech cam, that seems to adjust the frame rate automatically down according to the ambient light and therefore only runs at 6fps average, the tangible experience does gain a lot through an almost real time response/output.

The following items are on my shopping list and will hopefully improve my setUp a lot:

2 acrylic “hot” first surface mirrors -> eliminate ghost effect & reduce hot spot

1 unibrain firewire remote cam -> increase frame rate

1 880nm bandpass filter -> wavelength filter

Here are the Specs for the projector:

Taxan U6 -132

Brightness: 2000 ANSI LUMEN

Contrast: 2000:1

Native Resolution: 1024×768

AspectRatio: XGA 4:3

Cheers & thx goes out to David Agius

Gabor

Filed under: Hardware

IR LED Frame

Filed under: Hardware, Visual Diary

DSI SetUp Improvement

0.26am: 4.5 hours and 2 Alley McBeal DVDs later, I find myself in a pretty messy garage with a few fiddly improvements on my DSI setup that have been worth the effort. Firstly did i raise my Endlighten about a few millimeters and also brought my leds closer to the acrylic. Both done with 2 extra layers of white foam tape and added an uppermost layer of aluminium tape to reflect as much IR light as possible back into my setup. Secondly I’ve exchanged my drafting vellum projection plane with a regular tracing paper. Last and most time consuming procedure of all has been the re-soldering of pcb conductors that happened to break whilst step 1. Next time I will buy those quite costy little connection modules to avoid breakage of conductors and allow a reassembly by just screwing those pcbs apart. Now I know that they would have been worth it. In any way…I’m relatively satisfied with my blobs, that glow like WOW! Relatively, because my fiducial recognition still didn’t work out, even though the images became quite more readable. I assume its my dirty hack camera I’ve posted about recently, that still causes some minor blur and therefore probably prevents tracking. I guess I call it a day and tackle this problem tomorrow. G’night

Filed under: Hardware