I was able to get my hands on a CVS camcorder this past week. The unit is very cool. It doesn’t have any features of a “real” video camera, but I view it like a super-version of my Digital camera which can take 15 seconds worth of video at a time. This one is only limited by available storage (about 20 minutes). The resolution can be turned up to 640×480, too.
Initially I couldn’t get a cable built for it. I had a spare USB cable and a spare Palm Pilot cable to merge, but after soldering it all together, the device wouldn’t take an address (but my laptop noticed it was getting plugged in). After a hint from Linus (“plug-ins are detected via power-draw, everything else is over the data lines”), I realized that perhaps the USB data wires were reversed (the cable has got to flip them on at least one end of the cable… I just got unlucky).
The software for downloading the videos had been ported to Linux, and I worked on some more code to have a one-shot ability to download all the videos from the camera. Now I’ve got autoconf/automake working for it, and have gotten myself added to the Saturn Tools project where we can all work on the code through SourceForge’s CVS. Much easier than endlessly trading patches. :)
So far, I’ve managed to wreck the splash-screen image during camera bootup. Something is busted with the usb_bulk_write calls, and the device stops taking writes after 4k worth of data. Hopefully I can get that repaired so I can be greeted by the Laughing Man. I’ve also got a JPG all ready to replace the logo screen, “powered by pure digital technology”, with my oh-so-clever “powered by pwnd digital technology”.
© 2005 – 2016, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
[…] In the back of my head, I’ve been wonder about various ways I could use my $20 camcorder. Making cheap movie shorts, like SNL’s “Lazy Sunday” come to mind. There are no fancy zooms or special effects. It’s all editing and audio. Bryce kicked some ideas my way, most of which include using the dogs and/or cats as the primary actors (I can pay them in kibble). He also suggested renewing my father’s Rottweiler Camcorder with a much smaller device. I think the images would be mostly obscured by my dog’s chin. We’ll see. I also worry it may suffer from being summarily ingested. […]
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