My father has a very poor sight and he needs a magnifier if he wants to read anything. He needs really big zoom, up to 100 times. He wanted to buy a special reader, such as this. But, unfortunately, he can't afford it, since it costs more than 2000 euros. I was thinking to try to make something myself, probably with a webcam. Do you think it would be possible? Is there any webcam that can zoom that well? Maybe a normal (HD) camera? He has a huge TV, so I was thinking to make a holder for the cam and connect it to the TV. He can then sit on the couch and read.
Any thoughts? I'm looking for the best and cheaper as possible solution. Any help would be great.
You would need to retrofit the webcam with a closeup lens. Make sure you get a high resolution webcam, 720p or better.
I'm less sure about the software, but surely there is something out there that will let you use a webcam as a simple viewer.
Of note: I am posting this from my ipad. With Goodreader software, you can pretty much zoom as large as you want, and the iPad is much less expensive than the device you described.
Related
I'm not sure if it's allowed ask these questions here, but looks important for us webdevelopers (even bad dev like me :p ).
The question is about export setting videons on Premiere. I'm looking for a background video 30s like airbnb or paypal. Yesterday, I check paypal size and it's only 10/15 Mb for more than a minute. How did they do?
Obviously you want a low average bit rate. Things that can help with that are: keep the resolution low (you can scale it up a bit on the client); use H.264 High Profile (for the H.264 version); use 2-pass encoding; use variable bit rate. You can try increasing the GOP length too.
I assume there's no audio, so that shouldn't be an issue. (Can't remember if Adobe has an option for no sound track, but you can set the audio to a very low bit rate, or post-process it with ffmpeg or something to remove the audio track.)
If you have any control over the video content, you can try to keep it compressible. For example, avoid video with lots of detail or rapid motion. You might be able to selectively blur parts in a way that doesn't look bad. If it doesn't move too fast, you might be able to decrease the frame rate.
If you really want to optimize, you'll probably need to experiment a lot.
I just bought a Sony A7 and I am blown away with the incredible pictures it takes, but now I would like to interact and automate the use of this camera using the Sony Remote Camera API. I consider myself a maker and would like to do some fun stuff: add a laser trigger with Arduino, do some computer controlled light painting, and some long-term (on the order of weeks) time-lapse photography. One reason I purchased this Sony camera over other models from famous brands such as Canon, Nikon, or Samsung is because of the ingenious Sony Remote Camera API. However, after reading through the API reference it seems that many of the features cannot be accessed. Is this true? Does anyone know a work around?
Specifically, I am interested in changing a lot of the manual settings that you can change through the menu system on the camera such as ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. I am also interested in taking HDR images in a time-lapse manner and it would be nice to change this setting through the API as well. If anyone knows, why wasn't the API opened up to the whole menu system in the first place?
Finally, if any employee of Sony is reading this I would like to make this plea: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE keep supporting the Remote Camera API and improve upon an already amazing idea! I think the more control you offer to makers and developers the more popular your cameras will become. I think you could create a cult following if you can manage to capture the imagination of makers across the world and get just one cool project to go viral on the internet. Using http and POST commands is super awesome, because it is OS agnostic and makes communication a breeze. Did I mention that is awesome?! Sony's cameras will nicely integrate themselves into the internet of things.
I think the Remote Camera API strategy is better than the strategies of Sony's competitors. Nikon and Canon have nothing comparable. The closest thing is Samsung gluing Android onto the Galaxy NX, but that is a completely unnecessary cost since most people already own a smart phone; all that needs to exist is a link that allows the camera to talk to the phone, like the Sony API. Sony gets it. Please don't abandon this direction you are taking or the Remote Camera API, because I love where it is heading.
Thanks!
New API features for the Lens Style Cameras DSC-QX100 and DSC-QX10 will be expanded during the spring of 2014. The shutter speed functionality, white balance, ISO settings and more will be included! Check out the official announcement here: https://developer.sony.com/2014/02/24/new-cameras-now-support-camera-remote-api-beta-new-api-features-coming-this-spring-to-selected-cameras/
Thanks a lot for your valuable feedback. Great to hear, that the APIs are used and we are looking forward nice implementations!
Peter
I'm playing around with the CoreAudio CAPlayThrough example provided by Apple. I'm not doing anything fancy, just attempting to get my guitar to pass through an audio interface (m-audio fast track pro) to my computer and then back out the interface into my headphones. I'm getting some audio to pass through, but the quality is terrible. I have the sample rate set to 48k on the input and output. Is there something I'm missing? I suspect it may be an issue with the bit rate, but I'm not sure how to change that. Any guesses as to what maybe causing this quality issue?
Let's imagine that we have any of popular photocameras (like Canon or whatever) installed on a mechanical platform. This platform allows us to accurately adjust camera's lens direction to any interesting object. This platform is controlled from PC via microcontroller board. But we need a feedback from a photocamera - the image which currently appears on camera's display. Obviously, this feedback is required to be sure that the camera looks in a right direction. At the moment I don't know how to get a single shot image from photocamera by a microcontroller.
Could you please recommend me any directions to dig to ? Any recommendations on how to select photo camera (web cameras are not allowed) ? Any tips ?
Thank you in advance =)
Dwelch is right, you need to pick a "friendly" camera and work from there - google CHDK for a starter.
You could use the SPI interface of a micro to spoof being an SD card, and accept image data from the camera straight into the micro, but you would probably need quite a fast micro with a fair amount of RAM, especially if you want to do any processing on it.
Other than that, you could sample the camera's AV-output (if it has one), either into the micro or straight into the PC via a USB capture stick (or USB capture stick into micro if you're being a show-off), or maybe interrogate the camera over its USB or (insert name of proprietary port here) IO port.
Getting more hacky (yes, even more!) you could sniff the LCD data bus of the camera and steal the image from that, but that brings all sorts of pain, and tiny, tiny screws.
I'm working on a pretty complicated app right now, but I just got a really good, niche market idea for an AR game for iPhone. I would love to get some preliminary research done on whether or not it is worth the effort. I got a few (about 4 days) in which to code this. Is this a realistic timeline for what I'm trying to accomplish?
While I'm pretty familiar with the CMDeviceMotion, and can get location updates from GPS, there are 4 features that I think may take a colossal amount of work:
1) Working with camera in real time to draw augmented reality controls. Are there any good tutorials on how to overlay a view on top of a live camera feed?
2)Making the app work when GPS reception is spotty. It seems that some apps know how to keep updating the location based on accelerometer/gyroscope from the last known location. Where would I start on this front?
3)The networking component. I'm very new to multiplayer games. I got a website that can run PHP. Should I abandon my networking idea until I get a web server? Or is there some way I can run this in P2P over 3G without a base station?
4)Google maps integration for fast updates. Does this take a lot of effort?
I'm sorry if any of these questions are too broad and vague. I'm very excited about this idea, but would like to know what I'm dealing with before spending time on the app and realizing that I'm dealing with a monumental task!
I think you are dealing with a monumental task (especially the multiplayer part, where you'll encounter issues like lag/timing).
For the augmented reality part of your project, you can take a look at mixare augmented reality engine. It's free and open source software and the code is available on github: https://github.com/mixare/
Be aware that if you base your code upon mixare, you'll have to release your app under the same GPLv3 license as mixare.
Good luck for your project!
HTH,
Daniele