Several years ago I purchased a small video camera that was shaped like a flashlight for $50. It had VGA 640 x 480 30 fps video quality and would record up to 2 hours on a single charge. I used it to record several bike rides around the county on numerous bike trails. The videos provided a way to recall the conditions and experiences which I used to plan future trips. A couple of years later I purchased some 808…
My initial intent for this post was to elaborate on a concept that I found inspiring. Jörn Loviscach (http://www.j3l7h.de/about.html) had posted a demonstration of a “Poor Man’s Thermographic Camera” that consisted of low cost parts. It scans a scene and processes the visual data to create a thermographic image. The thermo cam consists of a pyrometer sensor (aka non contact ir thermometer), two servos that tilt mirrors, and mounting hardware. It acquires images from the reflection of heat by tilting…
Presenting visual data readings into an image file can seem challenging. It need not be thanks to the Netpbm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netpbm_format) file formats. First developed by Jef Poskanzer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Poskanzer) as a means of sending image data via email. The early adaptations of email did not work well with data other than ASCII. Messages would become corrupt if binary data was included in messages. Today, this is not an issue. However, the work around for this was to use one of the…