Registered: Sep 2000
Location:
Posts: 12

Does anyone have any idea if this would be bad for the eyemodule. I just want to know if I need to be extra specially careful about this, or if it doesn't really matter. Do CCDs "burn out" if too brightly exposed?

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Registered: Apr 2000
Location: Oakland, CA USA
Posts: 61

In theory this is true--direct sun is bad for light sensors.
Each little pixel is like a little capacitor that gets charged when photons hit it. Even if the power is off, direct sunlight through the lens could make pixels go bad over a long period of time. I'd worry more about leaving your electronics in the hot sun for that long.

Having the sun in your picture for 30 seconds or so probably won't ruin anything. I would try to avoid it, however, especially since if you take a picture of the sun it will actually be a black dot in your image!

Registered: Sep 2000
Location:
Posts: 12

My desire is to mount it on an r/c plane (r/c sailplane actually) and use a servo attached to a "finger" to snap photos). I'm concerned that I won't have any direct control over when the camera is facing the sun, which it may do for minutes at a time considering on the direction it is flying. I'm considering using a servo attached to an opaque sheet to block the camera except when I actually want to shoot a photo. In such a case, I could deliberately only uncoverthe camera when it's facing away from the sun.. This just complicates things though and I just wanted to know if I needed to worry about it in the first place.

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Keith Wiley *
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Registered: Nov 1999
Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan USA
Posts: 790

If you ever do this

Just to try things out, you could skip the whole take-a-picture servo and just set it to take 20 pictures something like 20 seconds apart.

How does an RC sailplane get up?

However you do it, if you pull it off, please put up the resulting pictures and any tech info about the project too! This sounds really cool!

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Jeff

Last edited by PDAENVY on 04-17-2001 at 02:42 PM

Registered: Sep 2000
Location:
Posts: 12

r/c sailplanes have no engine and propeller (or they do but don't use it much). You get them into the air either by throwing them if you have a hill and a good wind, or by using a gigantic slingshot (just a huge piece of bungee basically) to rocket them up. Once they're up in the air, if you're good at find thermals you can soard forever of course.

Many people have mounted cameras on these things before, but I want to do it with the visor but I may turn the plance robotic at some point and actually have the visor take over flying, using the eyemodule for robotic vision of course.

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Keith Wiley *
[email protected] * * * * * *
http://www.unm.edu/~keithw *** ** * * ** *
http://www.listensmart.com/Keith (mp3 music) * ** ** ***