3ric Johansen emailed me about this terrific video he made with Nathan Pegram using Intellectual Ventures‘ Phantom camera at Maker Faire 2010.
We conducted some pure hackery in order to make these videos. The first key part was having a “Nanoflash SDI recorder”. This standalone recorder can do real-time compression of 1080p content onto compact flash. In order to film and export video at a fast rate, we needed some other method than our typical “wait 15 minutes for gigabit ethernet” process. So we wired up this recorder to the Phantom, along with a linksys WRT54G access point running rogue firmware. The rogue firmware (which runs linux) enables us to make custom web applications which run on the access point. We built a [very simple] cgi which controlled one of the LEDs on the front of the AP. We then did more of our ‘hotel soldering’ to wire up this LED to the nanoflash recorder. Tada! We now have software control of this standalone recorder. Besides being useful for doing live demos, this mod/hack will enable us to take highspeed video and export it at a very fast speed. We still need to build an application which will sync the playback from the Phantom with the recording on the Nanoflash.
Music: “Raise Riddim” by I.D. & Baobinga