New Glocal Camera Hack kits have been developed. Much like the originals, these kits are Arduino based camera triggers, but the mark 2 hack kit now contains an accelerometer and a light sensor to increase the possibilities of your photographic experiments. The camera can now be activated by a sudden bright light (for example, a door opening into a dark room), an absence of light (for example breaking a laser path), or by shakes, sudden movements, or tilt in axis.

By automating the firing of the camera, we can move away from images always being made at eye level. The use of these camera triggers allow us to capture images from new perspectives, and in new ways. By actually removing some human control from the equation, we open up possibilities for new and exciting images.

The kit is designed by artist Daniel Joliffe, and this download contains parts lists, assembly guides, schematics and everything you need to know in order to build one. Blank PCB’s are available from us,for free, so just contact us if you are intersted in one. Parts can obtained from Digikey or other online electronics vendors.

This screenshot from Glocal’s Motion Sequence Application (MSA) is an anonymous portrait of a tree in Holland Park – one of the many trees that were being showcased at Surrey’s Fusion Festival!

 Hello Glocal Blog Readers!

This Summer season has become an extremely prolific one for the info-crew at Glocal… 

In addition to the Canada Day festivities, the Glocal project was also represented by the Fusion Festival in Surrey (July 19-20, 2008), another Cultural Capitals of Canada initiative.

Computers in the tent were used to allow visitors to get creative with a web-cam. An additional computer provided access to the glocal website and blog so that visitors could see first hand how to download the software applications and contribute to the project.

Here are some more pictures from this culturally diverse summer blockbuster event…

(Read more…)

Hacking your old digital camera just got easier! Last week we received 250 printed circuit boards – built to connect your digital camera to a sound sensor and an intervalometer (see our camera hack post for more details).

You can see a step-by-step GIF animation of the process here: trigger.gif (2.21MB)

We’ve packaged these custom-made Arduino-based boards boards together with the necessary parts so that you can assemble your own hacked digi-cam and take photos from brand new perspectives.

Since the hacked cameras are self-contained, they can be placed in virtually any location and can take shots from almost any angle – hands-free. So far, working with students at our Digital Summer Camp, we’ve prototyped bicycle cams, skateboard cams, hamster-ball cams, spray-paint cams, RC-cams, tree-cams – and more!

Want one? Here’s our first of a series of weekly photo challenges. We’ll pick some of our favourites submisions – they’ll be posted here and the artists will receive a FREE Camera Trigger Kit. Because this is our first photo challenge, we’re giving away 10 FREE KITS!

Instructions:

1) Take a photograph from a unique perspective. From beneath a car, on top of a bridge, underwater, in your sock drawer – we want to see your world from a new angle.

2) Upload the photo to Flickr and tag it with ‘glocalproject’ and ‘photochallenge’.

If your image is selected, we’ll mail you a camera kit right away. We’ll be giving all of our boards away over the next few months – so stay tuned!

UPDATE: Glocal Camera Trigger Boards are here! And, we’re giving them away for FREE! 

Here’s a preliminary taste of one of the things we’ve been working on: the Glocal Camera trigger. This Arduino-based hack lets you take pictures by triggering your camera’s shutter on a time delay (every ten seconds, every 20, every ten minutes…), or by plain old sound: you make a noise and the camera takes a picture. We’ve been perfecting it and it is very sensitive- anything from a whisper to a loud sound will make it trigger the camera.

Our intention behind this is to come up with ways that the camera can be triggered from positions that are not connected to the body. If we aren’t holding the camera, imagine what kind of perspectives can be captured, and what unique situations might be documented.

We’ve asked our artist friend, Daniel Joliffe if he could come up with a circuit board design for this, one that makes for easy assembly and hacking. We’ll post that in a few weeks time, but for now, here is a zip file with the schematic in PDF and Eagle CAD formats, and the Arduino code too. And to whet your appetite for camera hacking, here are a few pictures of the first prototype.. (oh, and it fits in an Altoids tin).

glocal_camera_trigger_june26_08.zip (96k)