The eye of the Internet

Project The eye of the Internet
Status	In progress
Contact	User:Gori
Last Update	2012-10-08

The eye of the Internet makes one aware that Internet not only knows everything, but is also sees everything, courtesy of the many Webcams at the space.

The eye communicates with you by changing its color. When nobody is watching, it is green. When someone (or something) starts watching webcam 1, the eye turns to blue, then yellow, orange and red. When more than 5 streams are active, the eye turns white.

Steel structure

Components so far :

• A gear
• A thin slice from a electromotor stator
• A lot of large nails
• Pieces of rebar
• slices of steel plate

Build process :

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  Eye with the rays, mounting bracket, ready to mount the electronics.

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  Getting a sense of how the color works with the steel, testing the led cables.

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  Breadboard of the working prototype. We later connected all the leds behind single resistors per color channel.

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  Cleaned, and mounted in a triangle. Triangle cost a surprising amount of effort, especially starting from bent junk rebar.

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  The uncleaned result.

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  The welding process.

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  The final study before welding.

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  The back of the iris. I should have grinded the zinc coating first. It became really messy and required a lot of electrodes.

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  The completed iris.

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  After welding bunch of nails to each other, and burning them in the process, a I decided that I really needed a frame to carry the eye edge.

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  Second study

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  Initial study

Electronics hardware

• 12.50 Euro - Arduino nano V3 clone
• 4 Euro - ENC28J60 Ethernet LAN Network Module
• A cheap ethernet switch
• A IP webcam
• 14 eur for 100 pcs. RGB leds
• 2.60 - 100x160m pcb, 0.5 mm
• ?? - ULN2003A 2003 Array-7 NPN Darlingtons TI DIP-16

Setting it all up :

• Wiring the module to the board and some example code is here
• Current wiring :
  • VCC - 3.3V
  • GND - GND
  • SCK - Pin 13
  • SO - Pin 12
  • SI - Pin 11
  • CS - Pin 8

Software

Server side

• een trigger krijgen per request (1 per stream-begin) van de server, de streams hebben een TTL, dus dat is ook voldoende qua quesstimate. De rate, per seconden via een colormap.

Eye side

• example arduino rgb cycle code
• We will use the EtherCard library here

Cool ideas

• als je het helemaal fancy wil laat je eventueel wat geluiden via het space sound systeem lopen. Note that SSS start versterkers on demand op, en dat duurt even.
• SSS opstarten bij inbraak zou wel een mooie functie zijn: EXTERMINATE! samples door de space laten schallen
• een (gemotoriseerd) ooglid voor privacy control.
• een kwadrant/slice van t oog kan verlichten, gebaseerd op richting van de obstakel/ persoon die dichtbij staat.
• de volgende versie heeft oogleden/wimpers van gasvlammen. / Teslaspoelen die vlambogen produceren!