Hiatus - Infrared Camera

This being a vacation project some interference from school work was unavoidable. So let's see one of those things.

For a bigger project a normal web cam was converted to record the IR specter of light.

A 2 MP camera was chosen because it was cheap, had high fidelity, was easily disassemble, had plenty of room in the casing for modifications and was supported on Windows and Linux:

Nothing against any other brand, just happens that CANYON's model CNR-WCAM420 got closes to this parameters.

Next steps are obvious - disassembly, getting rid of the IR filter on the lens, finding the right negative film strip and replacing the IR light filter with visible light filter made from previous selected exposed film strip:

This would give us a black and white to slight red tinted image, depending on the driver and it's white balance auto correction:


Next step was modding the case and designing an IR LED lightning to make it see in the dark:

To achieve this two narrow and four wide angle IR LED's were used and wired in to two arrays which were turned on and off asynchronously every 14 ms:

Couple last additions included changing and modifying the wiring of one of the blue mini LED's in the cam to red to only light up when the IR LED array is switched on and extending the casing to accommodate for the array switch with some clear Plexiglas.

Final result looking like this:

And was used like this: