Starting a 3D camcorder housing

[naimis]

No housings yet exist for the Panasonic SDT750. I'm sure if I wanted to limit myself to 2D I could use an existing housing, but that's not why I bought the camera in the first place

I'd made posts earlier about controls, which is almost certainly the biggest difficulty in making a camera housing, but I'm gravitating more towards "soft" controls. Purchasing an Arduino microcontroller kit, I've managed this evening to get a working hall effect switch and an IR controller for the camera. The bad news is that the hall sensors I bought from sparkfun were "latching", that is, I have to turn it on with one magnetic pole and turn it off with the other. Not really what I had in mind.

Also, the IR won't turn the camera on, but it will turn it off. I'm not entirely sure why. For those interested, I'm using Ken Shirriff's IR library, modified to support the Panasonic remote (with help from LIRC and published remote control information.

In fact, I stayed up a bit late this evening so I could get the "macro" to work, that would change from AWB to MWB and set the white balance. Here's a picture of the "test bed", and a video of the control macro and Hall Effect sensor in action.




Begun, the next big project has...

 

[naimis]

I guess I can only laugh at myself for spending a week implementing, debugging and testing support for the Panasonic remote protocol in Ken Shirriff's IR library, only to find someone else had already done it over a year ago and posted the code in the blog's comments section....

At least I learned a bit in the process of reinventing the wheel, and I would've had to dig up all the remote codes anyway... but it probably would've gone a bit faster had I used the other guy's code right away. Maybe with this other code, the power code will actually turn the camera on, too, instead of just off...