This light-piped ring flash should do the trick. It’s gotta be cheaper than Canon’s offering (though cheap ring lights can be had for under $100), and it seems to work more than well enough.

The Aiptek GO-HD isn’t such a bad camera for the money. It does 720p video and 8 megapixel photos, but the lens doesn’t go very wide. But a post in the Flickr blog pointed to a solution: use a door peephole as a fisheye lens. It works, but holding the peephole in front of the camera can get tiresome. Here’s how I solved it:

A rubber stopper easily holds the peephole, while a 1.25 inch hole in the stopper slides over the lens protrusion and holds snugly to it. Here’s the step by step:

Start with the parts. I’ve got an electric drill and a number of bits at the house, but I had to go to the store for the 1.25 inch drill bit. I also don’t have large rubber stoppers or peepholes laying around, so I picked those up too.

The hardest part (well, the only part) is drilling the two concentric holes, making sure they’re centered and straight through. My drill has a bubble level to make this easier.

My 1.25 inch bit had a screw-type guide in the center, making it easier to drill the larger hole first.

The larger hole fits snugly around the lens, the smaller hole holds the peephole.

Here is the camera before and after attaching the fisheye. The rubber stopper fits snugly, but is easy to attach and remove.

In use, I find I have to zoom to its maximum telephoto setting. The circular peephole view almost fills the width of the 16×9 frame that way, though it crops quite a bit of the top and bottom.

I didn’t have Sandee to chase around the house after finishing this, so I had to test it on myself and my cat:

Flickr blog I discovered the Peephole fish eye group. The idea is simple: us a $5 door peephole to give your camera a fisheye lens. Here are the instructions:

1. Hold peephole against rim of camera lens.
2. Set camera to “macro”. (the image is actually displayed on the inside face of the convex lens of the peephole. The camera must focus on the foreground image rather than the background image.)
3. Zoom in to the point that the viewable “circle” is framed almost evenly.
4. For best results, brighter lighting will avoid unwanted noise (grain)
5. Enjoy and have fun.

You can buy a pricier model with the Lomo label on it (and if you go looking, you’ll find a “peephole reverser” which is probably useless for your photography…probably). Henry Gordon Dietz offers a lot more info.

Above is my first experiment with a peephole fisheye and my cheap video camera.

Mike Figgis‘ Fig Rig works equally well for guys in sneakers and guys in suits, but they’re not free, which is why you have to love Keith Lewis’ DIY version. PVC is sexy!

My friend Troy sent along a pointer to The Gadget Show’s feature on DIY hoverboards. They claim it all goes together with basic tools, a leaf blower, plywood, a bit of pipe, and other various parts totaling about £150. Oh yeah, they also recommend “an insurance policy with good fringe benefits,” and being as British as they are, apparently “craft knives” and “scalpels” are pretty interchangeable.

It all goes together in eight easy steps explained on four pages, so what’s keeping you? Isn’t it time to scour your local big box store for deals on last year’s leaf blowers?

The Gadget Show, diy, hoverboard, hover board, Jason Bradbury, leaf blower, do it yourself, Gadget Show, hovercraft

CubeSat is Cal Poly’s plan to make space accessible to the rest of us. That is, they want to make it easy and cheap enough to launch satellites that even high schools can get a chance at it. Engadget says they call it “the Apple II of space exploration” (link added). Here, read this:

The CubeSat Project is a international collaboration of over 40 universities, high schools, and private firms developing picosatellites containing scientific, private, and government payloads. A CubeSat is a 10 cm cube with a mass of up to 1 kg.

…we provide a standard, reliable, and flight proven deployment system. The Poly Picosatellite Orbital Deployer, or P-POD, is a tubular, spring loaded mechanism taking up very little space. It can be integrated into any launch vehicle and protects primary payloads from the CubeSats and vise-vera. By repeatedly flight proving the P-POD design, we hope to instill confidence in launch providers, primary payloads, and organizations interested in flying experiments on CubeSats. We envision a day when P-PODs can manifested into a mission with minimal per launch integration time and engineering costs.

Launch costs are said to be about $40,000, while Engadget figures construction costs will run another $40,000. CubSatKit.com offers parts (price list) that they say fully conform to the design specification (oversized drawing).

The next launch is scheduled January 2005 with 14 satellites from 11 entities, including a private CubeSat from The Aerospace Corporation.

tags: calpoly, cubesat, cubesat project, diy, diy satellite, launch vehicle, microsatellite, pod, pods, satellite, space, space exploration, space race