Well its been awhile since I posted the progress of my DIY helmet cam. Well theres been alot of ups and downs. Mostly its been trying to get the camera to look the right friggin direction. I think I may have solved this with a Laser Pointer. I basically tacked the laserpointer to the top of my camera, centered the laser on the the center of the recording and then attached it to my helmet. I saw how much the camera was off and adjusted. Hopefully this will fix it for the next recording.
The second problem was that my microphone wasnt recording sound.. It worked in the pc.. but then again my pc can record in stereo. So I found out that the ground casing was the ground on my diy helmet cam. That means the black cable inside the audio cable was useless.. since its considered right channel on stereo recording devices. I just went ahead and wired both black and ground together to avoid any other problems.
Here’s a video of that:
Once I got the mic working I realized that is sounded absolutely horrible when the helmet was closed.
Here judge for yourself:
So I moved it down to my mouth instead of having it up by my eye where I thought it would pick up sound and not the wind… oh well 
Most of us like to think our lives are important and that we don’t have time for others. Thankfully this type of attitude helps greatly in my next post.
Throughout life there have been people scheming up shortcuts to get your tasks done throughout the day and hopefully some of these will help you.
Imagine you are late for work but like me, you work at a really early/late time and there is no traffic on the road. You are heading to work and a single stoplight decides to turn yellow and then red on you. You look around and there are no other cars any where to be seen. Instead of breaking the law, try some of these tricks instead:
- Creep upto the light
- Flash your headlights like a maniac.
This may sound crazy, but you are covering two bases. Firstly, some lights rely on a loop of wire under the ground that senses the metal in the car. If you pull up to a light you may have very well gone past that strip. Next time you are out on a sunny day, look for the two lines by the stoplight where they played the wire and covered it up.
If you notice, this image provided by howstuffworks.com explains how the loop under the ground detects the metal in your car. If you drive a motorcycle or bike.. put a earth magnet on the bottom to get the same effect.
If this doesn’t work.. don’t fear. Most likely there is still hope. Ever wonder how the police and ambulances always seem to get the go ahead? At the top of most new lights is a small sensor that detects patterns in lights. Specifically it detects strobing lights. You can mimic this by flashing your high beams very quickly while approaching the light.
So you got to your destination alright, right? Well too bad you work on the 10th level of the building! This is going to take forever to get to your floor. Not always. If you have one of the more common elevators and the “close door” button actually works (most of them are turned off.) you can cheat the system. Hold the close door button and press the floor you want to go and if all goes well, you should be sneaking past all those people who have been waiting on the floors above you.
Do you want to add a digg this button to your site that will automatically submit your post to digg?
I have tried a lot of different plugins and all are either missing customizations that I wanted or had some weird color scheming or used IFRAMES…haha.
Well I went to the digg site and they had a section on integration: FANTASTIC.
I saw the variables that needed to be filled out and I saw how we could do that automatically with wordpress.
The code boiled down to the following:
So ever since I wanted a bike I have been a fan of 13mordeth‘s video’s on youtube. He basically vlogs while riding his motorcycle from anything as simple as the day or as complex as rider training. This inspired me to start this myself when I get my bike up and running. The way he does it is that he jams a digital camera into his noseguard and just presses record. Well I tried this, and there is no way my huge face is going to let anything in the helmet but me. The fact that I had to buy a 2x in order to even get my head in one at the store is just a little insight.
Well I went to bestbuy and noticed that they had alot of camera’s on sale and some are even in HD for cheap. The flip mino’s and the others all seemed good, but I wanted something tiny and something shotgun shaped because you see, I had other plans for this badboy.
I was almost about to leave without a camera and was going to be forced to buy a crappy “helmet cam” off of ebay that you basically had to plug into a video in of some old camera when I came across the Insignia HD sitting on a shelf in really cheap plastic. My first thoughts were; “shitty packaging means I can break it without feeling to bad!” Well it was still around 100 bucks.. but if I could get it all to work it would be great!.
I got it home and tried to jam it inside my helmet and it worked, but barely. What I needed was a DIY solution. I needed to mount this camera outside my helmet!
Hey, I made this. Hope you all like my bike and my short little tutorial.
If you actually click the video while its playing it will open in another window at youtubes site, there will be a “watch in HD” option as well!
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