Pittsburgh Arts, Regional Theatre, New Work, Producing, Copyright, Labor Unions,
New Products, Coping Skills, J-O-Bs...
Theatre industry news, University & School of Drama Announcements, plus occasional course support for
Carnegie Mellon School of Drama Faculty, Staff, Students, and Alumni.
hackaday.com: [Shane Ormonde] recently learned how to measure distance using just a webcam, a laser, and everyone’s favorite math — trigonometry. Since then he’s thrown the device onto a stepper motor, and now has a clever 2D room mapping machine.
Well this is cool. Unless the mounting brackets are machined to be very accurate and parallel, it seems to me that the system would become inaccurate very quickly. Also, if all the software is doing is searching for the brightest point, even if it is in only a small section of video frame, if the camera happened to scan over a light, it seems like it could be problematic.
This is a neat little trick. I don't know if it can be made accurate enough to make it actually useful for anything, but maybe with a few adjustments it can. What is really interesting about this system is that non of the hardware or software is in any way complex. The whole system is only a couple of dollars (other then the computer). I could see this type of laser webcam measurement being adapted to a small low quality laser range finder that attaches to a phone. I would like to know if the image we see on screen has been cleaned up by software at all. I think that it might not be and that if it was it would be a very accurate over all model of the room.
I think the guy in the video said it best: it's pretty good for a laser and a webcam. This is one of those maker projects where it has no direct value in the world, but it's a cool place to start a lot of projects. I want to make some things this summer with an arduino and some sensors and python. Without people who sit and play with things like this, I wouldn't be able to do any of that. These little projects are hugely important to discovering new, cheaper, easier, and faster ways to do what technology is just starting to make possible (3-d printing, laser cutting, cnc anything...)
This make shift tool seems as though it would have been super useful about a year ago. At my high school, there was an unexplainable lack of accurate blueprints for the theatre so we had to measure it all as a "senior project". Turns out that going through and doing a detailed drawing of a theatre that includes seating is not as fun as one would think. To add to it, we didn't even have a laser measurer.
This seems like really useful little tool to out together for quick and simple things. Like if you wanted basic blueprints, like Sam did, that'd be really cool. I understand its not that accurate, but you get what you pay for. And for the price it seems really cool. I wouldn't mind having the blueprints for certain spaces in my house. My parents want to upgrade so tech stuff and its my job to figure out distances and how to run things, if I had blue prints, it'd be a lot easier!
Very cool. Machine vision is a very neat field but the professional equipment necessary to break into it has often been exceedingly expensive. Full scale LIDAR systems cost thousands of dollars, but to be able to create "good enough" systems for tens of dollars instead is very, very cool.
6 comments:
Well this is cool. Unless the mounting brackets are machined to be very accurate and parallel, it seems to me that the system would become inaccurate very quickly. Also, if all the software is doing is searching for the brightest point, even if it is in only a small section of video frame, if the camera happened to scan over a light, it seems like it could be problematic.
This is a neat little trick. I don't know if it can be made accurate enough to make it actually useful for anything, but maybe with a few adjustments it can. What is really interesting about this system is that non of the hardware or software is in any way complex. The whole system is only a couple of dollars (other then the computer). I could see this type of laser webcam measurement being adapted to a small low quality laser range finder that attaches to a phone. I would like to know if the image we see on screen has been cleaned up by software at all. I think that it might not be and that if it was it would be a very accurate over all model of the room.
I think the guy in the video said it best: it's pretty good for a laser and a webcam. This is one of those maker projects where it has no direct value in the world, but it's a cool place to start a lot of projects. I want to make some things this summer with an arduino and some sensors and python. Without people who sit and play with things like this, I wouldn't be able to do any of that. These little projects are hugely important to discovering new, cheaper, easier, and faster ways to do what technology is just starting to make possible (3-d printing, laser cutting, cnc anything...)
This make shift tool seems as though it would have been super useful about a year ago. At my high school, there was an unexplainable lack of accurate blueprints for the theatre so we had to measure it all as a "senior project". Turns out that going through and doing a detailed drawing of a theatre that includes seating is not as fun as one would think. To add to it, we didn't even have a laser measurer.
This seems like really useful little tool to out together for quick and simple things. Like if you wanted basic blueprints, like Sam did, that'd be really cool. I understand its not that accurate, but you get what you pay for. And for the price it seems really cool. I wouldn't mind having the blueprints for certain spaces in my house. My parents want to upgrade so tech stuff and its my job to figure out distances and how to run things, if I had blue prints, it'd be a lot easier!
Very cool. Machine vision is a very neat field but the professional equipment necessary to break into it has often been exceedingly expensive. Full scale LIDAR systems cost thousands of dollars, but to be able to create "good enough" systems for tens of dollars instead is very, very cool.
Post a Comment