Meteor and Sprite Cam EquipmentOur Meteor - Sprites and Jets Camera system is a new system I'm in the process of Setting up. Originally I just wanted to set up and "All Sky" camera. This typically is a camera that points up and gives a 360 degree image of the sky. This is done either with a wide angle lens or via some sort of spherical mirror. After doing some research I decided my interests for this project were really more aimed at a meteor capture camera. This project Required the following... 1 High sensitivity Low light Black and White Video Camera 1 PC with Video Capture Card 1 Software package geared towards Meteor or Astronomical Video / Motion Detection. 1 Area to aim the camera that was free of distracting things... (Moving branches and such) The initial part I needed was the camera. I did some more research and found the cheapest low light camera was a SuperCircuits PC164c. I got one and set it up in a camera housing on a tripod in the back field on top of our water pump house. Second I needed a pc with some sort of video capture system.. This was the easiest. I had a Hauppauge WinTv Card and a PC (I work on computers for a living and PC's are like Ants at a picnic at my house.) The most critical part of the system is the Software. Without it you hook your camera to a vcr and then scroll tape to find the meteors.. This would have been, Not fun. So I found several programs specifically written for this task. UFOCapture by Sonotaco.com A free limited function version and a Pay Version MetRec by http://www.metrec.org/ (Shareware) and a Macintosh based program which only lead me to dead links. Well.. I don't have Mac... MetRec only ran in DOS and only used one Kind of Video Capture Card. (Matrox meteor II) (The card name is a coincidence) So I went with UFOCapture Full V2 version. It costs but it's well worth it for this kind of project. The free version will only capture 320X240 avi and doesn't extract any kind of still images of the captured event automatically. The full version will Time stamp the event, Capture several still frames with motion detection marks and will do all kinds of data keeping about the event. It also does much more. If you're interested I really recommend it! Having set up the camera I waited for my camera's First Meteor!! Well typical of West Texas at that time of year. We had thunderstorms moving towards us from up near Lubbock that night. I ran it anyway thinking I might get something before the clouds got here. The next morning I eagerly looked at my directory and found that instead of meteors, I'd caught something unexpected! Sprites! This is what it saw
Wow! I never thought of that. I'd heard about sprites and Jets but never thought I'd actually capture one on video. It makes sense that living in Texas I ought have a lightning phenomena camera. I began to rethink my project. Ok I needed to get the camera up higher. I needed to come up with some way to move it around from up on high without having to do it manually.
I used 2 of them to get the camera at TreeTop Level.
I then enlisting my son to help me get stuff Setup.. We took turns climbing and wiring the controller to the pan tilt head, Camera and Power.
It Videoed! It captured birds flying by!! Cool! I put the snazzy Cover in the control box and mounted it on the Pump house and ran the serial cable into "Mission Central! (The house) My next task was to come up with a way to talk to this monster! I control box was designed to talk to Security DVR systems and not really designed to be commanded by A pc via whatever way some home hacker was gonna come up with. The documentation (two sheets of paper) that came with the control box was very sparse and printed in obviously translated Chinese. It basically had a simple diagram of how to hook it to your DVR system and what to set the little switches to so it could speak the DVR's Pan tilt control language.. (there were about 5-6) OMG!! I researched several of the control protocol settings and decided on Pelco_P because it seemed to be the one that was best documented on the internet. My Pelco_P searching eventually lead me to this page... http://www.232analyzer.com/RS232_Examples/CCTV/Pelco_D_Pelco_P_Examples_Tutorial.HTM#3 OK I now had the Strings of data the box wanted to hear. Now I had to get them there somehow... Back to the internet.. I found this site. http://www.geocities.com/zoomkat/byte.htm. To make a long story longer... This person had built a pan/tilt head from some little servo motors and used a chip that could be commanded via simple ascii (letters & characters) strings. (groups of letters & characters). What I was looking for was... How to get data out to the serial port on the pc so it could talk to the control box outside.. I really wanted to to this with Batch files if I could. Batch files are easy to create use. What I needed was a program that would take my Pelco_p command string and direct it out the Com port (serial port) to the control box to act on. This page had exactly what I wanted. Specifically... this part ... Copy the 4 lines between the ===== lines below (watch for word wrap, each line starts with echo and ends with com), paste them in notepad (with word wrap turned off), and save as echoo.bat. Double click on the echoo.bat file and the echoo.com file should appear. =============ECHOO.BAT======================================================== echo Bj@jzh`0X-`/PPPPPPa(DE(DM(DO(Dh(Ls(Lu(LX(LeZRR]EEEUYRX2Dx=>echoo.com ============================================================================== What this does is create a small batch file that, when run, creates a small program calledechoo.com. Echoo.com takes ascii stings and "pipes" them out whichever com port you ask it to. Having all this in place I created my little pan tilt batch Script file. =============pantilt.bat========================================================@echo off To send commands using this batch file I use the following...c:\pantilt.bat right 20 This tells the control box to pan right for 20 seconds. From this you can pretty much figure out that up, down, left work the same way.The pan/tilt head I have lacks any kind of positional awareness so I have to use timings to place the camera where I want.Future Improvements? Positional awareness for the pan tilt head, probably via a Basic Stamp board with a magnetic compass sensor and a tilt sensor.UPDATE!.I got the Compass and tilt sensors and
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I had some 10 foot tower segments I could use for the camera tower. 
I needed some kind of a pan tilt system... Hello Ebay!! I found an 
I now needed some way to control it via PC. (I work nights and sometimes I'm not at home to push a button) Hello Ebay again!! I found a 
Obviously he loved helping his ol' Geeky dad work on his geeky project! =) Seriously he did have a good time!..... climbing the camera tower! 
We got everything wired together and tested the system. It Panned! 
Weather Facts: Did you know? : Thunder can only be heard about 12 miles away under good quiet outdoor conditions |