Fun little project I threw together..

[X_Digger]

I'm in the middle of setting up a new fish tank and equipment room. In our old house, I had a couple of webcams and usb microscope cameras pointed at the tank. I made a page that the cameras are embedded in, and I also switch out different images in the page depending on the status (on/off) of different devices, pulled from the tank controller I use.

While the new tank is empty, I figured I'd add something to play with.

http://www.rowelab.com/fish/camera/ -- click 'spin the fish'

It's a phidgets SBC running debian, with a stepper motor controller and a stepper motor from an old printer.

[limpyhobbler]

1. This is cool. Is this eventually going to be pointed at the fish?

[X_Digger]

2. Yup!

I'll fab up a bracket to put the cameras closer to the tank, so that you can pan around and look at the fish and corals.

I'll also set up the USB microscopes again, which will be pointed at the sand / water interface in the refugium (a place to grow and harvest macroalgae to export nitrates.) You see some interesting little critters with a biodiverse marine tank.



For scale, those hairy looking strings are bacteria.

[limpyhobbler]

3. Very cool.

[Phillip McCleod]

4. truly awesome.

what language did you choose to write in for the phidgets widget, out of curiosity?

[X_Digger]

5. Python- it seemed to be the quickest to bring up.

I didn't do an application framework or anything, just plain old mod_cgi in apache.

[Phillip McCleod]

8. good choice imo

but then i'm partial to it.

[Recursion]

6. Well hacked, sir!

I raise a beer in your honor.

[X_Digger]

7. Hehe, thanks! Most of my tinkering involves my tank..

I wrote a tcl script to scrape the stats from my tank controller and they get pushed to the scrolling sign in my office..



And I made a service that others with tank controllers can use to generate signatures for forum posts..






eta: I eventually want to make a set of rails for the stepper motors, to move the camera itself up and down, left and right, rather than just having it pivot from the same fixed point.

[X_Digger]

9. We got bored, so...

.. there's something new in the tank to look at.

http://srv.rowelab.com/fish/camera/

[X_Digger]

10. A small update..

Last edited Thu Oct 24, 2013, 11:42 PM - Edit history (1)

I made a.. I guess it'd be a one-axis CNC camera. I picked up a bit of MakerSlide from inventables.com along with a few bearings, pulleys, and a toothed belt. I made a tram for the camera to ride on, controlled by a stepper motor.



Click 'Shift Cam Left' and 'Shift Cam Right' to move the camera.

http://srv.rowelab.com/fish/camera/index_test.php

Be easy on it, I don't have limit switches in place at the ends.