Paul Robertson

Thanks Perry, Well, that's why I was asking, as I am just learning about this and am unfamiliar with bits and color depth and such, but I was up until 1AM reading up on it and discovered I should at least use 10 bit, maybe more. I think I will still pick up this camera to give me something to play with as it's cheap and comes with a Pentax lens. Don't have much money to spend right now, lots of time though, but am searching for a better camera. And funny thing, Point Grey is only about 300km from here, but is now owned by another company. I called them asking if they had any "old" or returned inventory, still waiting for a call back. :unsure: I am planning on slow continuous motion, maybe 2-4 fps, I won't know until I get it assembled, but I have a plethora of goodies on the way with the Arduino, optical sensors, hall effect sensors, PWM motor drivers, several different RGB square LED arrays, some single white LEDs with different color temp, and a few other things. The first thing I removed was that 500W lamp, holy crap that thing is a beast. I also removed the condenser lens which focused the light on the film gate, but left in the heat shield glass hoping it may work as an IR filter. In the slot of that removed lens, I placed several stacked sheets of diffusion plastic sheets obtained from an old LCD monitor, cool stuff, it really makes my temporary 1W LED light source pretty decent. I could go on and on, but will save it for the next post. Thanks for the input, really having fun with this and looking forward to learning Arduino code, I ordered 3 boards as I know I will find uses for them around our property. Cheers

Well all this cold weather has given me time to work inside on this project. Today I installed a DC motor installed in place of the AC motor. It's a Faulhaber DC coreless motor made in Germany, with a small diameter shaft which I had to machine a sleeve for so that the 1/4" pulley would fit. It will work down to 2 volts and still has enough torque to turn everything, draws 200mA. At that voltage it turns the projector at about 2 fps. I mounted it on a plexiglas panel I fabricated and mounted it to the original motor/fan housing. My biggest challenge is the optics. I have just found a CMOS sensor machine vision camera, with C lens mount, here are the specs. I think it will work, but would appreciate any input from those wiser than me. It's the Mightex MLE-C030 and is an 8 bit color, 3MP USB 2.0 camera with 2048x1536 pixel, 8fps at that resolution, rolling shutter. https://secure.mightexsystems.com/pdfs/Unbuffered%20USB2.0%20Color%203MP%20CMOS%20Cameras.pdf Cheers

Wondering how everyone who participated in this thread is doing with their projects? I am just getting started and have learned a lot from this thread. I have several projectors I can use to make this, settled on Arduino UNO or MEGA 2560 for the controller, just working on the optical portion of it now. I have a nice Sony HVR-Z7U with removable lens, that streams either HDMI or thru firewire, I have firewire currently working into VirtualDub and the image looks good. I really need to find the right lens and tubes etc to mount on the Sony, or find a machine vision camera which would be WAY easier to use. The Sony is a beast. Projectors include Sekonic 8 model 30C, Sankyo 1000 Dualux and my Dad's Bolex 18-5 which I really don't want to modify. All of my film is regular 8mm. Look forward to hearing from you. Cheers