This is a photo taken from my radio-controlled airplane at the home
field of the Green Mountain RC'ers
in Essex, Vermont, USA. The flying field is at the bottom.
Notice the corn fields? I discovered that a plane lost in corn field is difficult
to find! So, I designed an alarm device for my plane that starts beeping when I shut
off my transmitter. Refer to my PIC microcontroller
circuits page for details about building your own.
These photos were taken with a Kodak DC-20 digital camera
carried on a radio-controlled airplane using a radio-to-camera
interface. The R/C transmitter communicates with the camera using a spare servo
channel. The interface consists of a PIC 12C509 or 16F84 microprocessor programmed
to convert the servo signal to the 9600-baud "capture image" message required by
the camera. Here are various digital camera ideas:
- Refer to my PIC microcontroller circuits
page if you would like to build your own R/C interface for the DC-20 camera.
(Unfortunately, the Kodak DC-20 camera is out of production and is getting
very hard to find apart from the used market.
eBay seems to be a source of
DC-20's from $50-120 U.S. Search for "DC20" (without a "-").
- Another place to look is Mike Shellim's web site. He designed a camera interface for the Olympus C400L, D340 and C840L and similar digital cameras that is based on the Parallax Basic Stamp 2.
- Refer also to Steve Warley's site for a video scheme (recorded, not live.) This inexpensive ($99 and cheaper) DSC-350 camera combined with Steve's techniques is a three-in-one solution that combines the features of a digital still capture camera with a digital video camera and a PC WebCam wrapped into one convenient pocket size device. With twice as much imaging memory as any other digital camera in its class, it can store up to 145 still images at a resolution of 640x480 or up to 4.5 minutes of video.
- This web site has a list of various camera communication protocols.