Have you ever wanted to add a camera to a project or design, but just couldn’t find a suitable module? Maybe you’re at home tinkering, and you want to add a point-of-view camera to your kid’s bumper buggy. Not only is it difficult to find a suitable camera for such a project, but hacking and repurposing camera components is not a cheap venture.
Out of the box, Hackacam is a fully functional network camera, which, similar to GoPro Cameras, provides HD video in a compact, only in a DIY format. With networking capabilities, video can be recorded directly to the cloud via Google Drive or Dropbox. The platform includes of a lens kit, sensor module, DSP module, and the necessary cables to begin filming just about anywhere.
Front end image signal processing is handled by a Stretch DSP core, which takes raw data and converts it to noise reduced, dead-pixel-corrected, YUV frames for encoding. The really interesting aspect is the open coding that is available.
The camera comes supplied with a software development kit (SDK) so all camera functions can be accessed. Aside from standard image processing, the Hackacam can also perform video analytics and real-time motion detection thanks to set algorithms. It only gets more in depth from there, as you can program the Hackacam to update its own Facebook page or tweet you if there is excessive motion, with an attached picture.
An ARM processing core runs standard Linux and supports third party compiler tools, so programming can be written in C, C++, Java, or Python. An additional expansion port on the camera makes it easy to add an SD card reader (the organization is currently working on an SD Expansion Module) or TWI Bus.
Essentially, the Hackacam is like an open source engineer’s wonderland. The company has already been successfully funded, but with just over a week left, you can still snag a build-it-yourself camera and help support your peers in this entrepreneurial endeavor.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/761738591/hackacam-hackable-camera-platform?ref=live
