Sinister Camera

[tansis]

Life being full of winding paths, I had to turn off my soldering iron some years ago and earn a living punching a keyboard.Well a couple of months ago my little brother (he's 30,married,2 kids) badgers me into fitting "glow-wire" to his car interior,then asks could I change the green led's in the door switch cluster for blue... (quick trip to maplin store on a sunday morning) When I finally emerged from under the dashboard he says "Don't suppose tou can make it come on with the courtesy light" waving his remote alarm keyring.
"Uuugghahh!" says I, banging my head on the steering colum.
Good manners prevents me from repeating what I said to him at that moment,suffice to say I spoke for half a minute and said many,many unkind words, some of them foriegn, along with some physicaly painfull suggestions regarding his car keys and a hot soldering iron......

Suffice to say my iron has been switched back on and I'm now casting around for a project to get my teeth into.I've blown the dust off my old notebook (paper) and decided to have another go at a project that I abandond ten years ago on the grounds of cost.

Security Camera Motion Tracking.

There is little more sinister than a cctv following you around a room or across a car park sadly the vast magority are static and easily avoided, those that do move are the nodding dogs of the electronics world unwatched by bored underpaid "guards".

What I trying to build is a high speed servo mount with an scanning ultrasonic "radar" attached. Using hobby type transducers will give a detection range of about 30 feet at best, a larger array using piezo discs might improve things I dont know. Other options are scanning passive infra red and laser systems though lasers may still be out on grounds of cost and legal/safety reasons.

Rangefinding is an important aspect to the project otherwise it would be fairly straight-forward, the MKII may well have high power water pistol attached........

Anyone got any ideas on the ultrasonics?

 

[john1]

Hi tansis,

This sounds very interesting.
It is difficult to figure out what you want to do,
but it seems that you want to make some kind of mechanism
which will direct a security camera toward a detected
motion.

For high speed movements, you could use pneumatic piston
type drives, they can track a fly.

For the movements that you want to detect, you could
consider using the image display, they make software that
will pick out various shapes, such as a vehicle or a
person. Such software is quite sophisticated, and you
could probably set it to watch the nearest or the farthest.

Making a sonar based system sounds very difficult.

If you want to track something that moves around very quickly
the picture refresh time might be a problem.

If the area you are scanning has other motions in its field,
these could be a problem, such as leafy branches blowing
about, or washing on the line, or just nearby traffic.

Let us know how you get on,
Cheers, John