Received order of cheap webcams

So I got the three cheap $5 Logitech webcams that I had ordered a week or so ago and attempted to dissect one of them. After not finding a screw hole, I attacked it with some pliers and bent the plastic all off (I later found a screw hole hiding behind a piece of white rubber that allowed it all to easily come apart).

When I got the circuit board off and took the lenses off, I tried to find the IR sensor. It wasn't easily recognizable like the other webcam I had taken apart. I made the mistake of taking off the piece of glass covering the sensor and after doing this to 2 of the cameras, realized that the IR sensor was instead in the lenses housing.


I pried off the lower lenses, and found the IR sensor, a tiny blue square sandwiched between the two lenses. I haven't torn apart the last remaining camera yet. Will leave that to another day. Thank goodness I bought a couple of the cameras and that they were cheap.

New Top Design and Flash Tests (New Videos!!!)

During my trip to Home Depot today I picked up some base board rail things which had paper covering a 90 degree thin piece of metal. I ripped the paper off and got a rail that was only 1cm or so tall/wide:

Like before I measured out the spacing to drill the holes for the LEDs:

I only made two rails, and pushed the LEDs in, twisted the wires, taped up the metal rails with electrical tape, and wired it up to the power supply:



I got really good blobs, though since it's a side DI, if your unused fingers or rest of your hand dips into the light plain it shows up as blobs, which isn't cool. Oh well. It works really good so I am super happy.
I finally figured out how to get the flash apps working with the touch inputs (run FLOSC Nolan! duh...), and so I got some really cool interactions as seen in the following pics and videos (my roommate Jeff was a good model...haha):




(Photo App)


(Physics App)



(Seth's Piano App)

(Tangrams)

Woohoo, yeah multitouch!