I give you… Time Lapse Bot 2!
This is an upgrade for the original Time Lapse Bot, although we lose a few things, we gain some others… specifically, better mobility and a lighter weight Time Lapse Bot.
We’ll be testing this guy out at BarCampMadison…
Update: See the result: BarCampMadison: Time Lapse Video
We’ve got a Sony PD-150 video camera which uses these “InfoLithium” batteries, and over the years, these batteries have given us a hard time, but no more… (We hope!)
See, when these batteries go “bad” they tell the camera not to work. When you power it on, there’s an error message: “For Infolithium Battery Only” which is the camera telling you it doesn’t like the battery. It should be noted that we’ve had the camera for about 9 years, and we’ve used third party batteries for years without issues, but hey, Sony is Sony, you know how they are.
Turns out the battery has a processor it in, and when things are not quite right, it tells the camera, and you get the error message. Don’t worry, the battery is not dead, it’s just very sick. :)
We got this error with one of our batteries, and since we still had one good one, I tossed the bad one in a drawer and forgot about it for about 9 months. Then our good one did the same thing, so I decided to pull out the bad one and give it one more try. Amazingly enough, it worked! Seems that since it was sitting dormant for so long, it must have lost enough charge to reset itself, and it was back to normal. (So now the bad one was the good one, and the good one was the bad one…. you follow?)
So the fix is to let your battery sit in a drawer unused for 9 months.
Or… I guess you could manually discharge it.
I’ll provide the warning that if the phrase “manually discharge” scares you, you might not want to do what is described below. (If you’re careful, it’s really not that dangerous, but people love disclaimers.)
I initially did some searching, and came across this page on Infolithium Batteries which held the secret. The whole page is worth a good read.
With knowledge in hand, er, in head, I stopped by Radio Shack and picked up a two-pack of 10 ohm/10 watt resistors. (Cost was about $2.00)
Photo by Mike Krukowski.
The idea is to short the battery with a resistor (do not try it without the resistor!) so that the battery can drain it’s charge and reset the processor. This took quite a while for the battery I had, and when you read that part about the resistor getting very hot I hope you were paying attention. It actually started to melt the MiniDV cassette case I had it sitting on. It’ll definitely burn skin. Put it on a safe surface that can take the heat!
I was warned by local robotics enthusiast Royce Pipkins that I should perhaps not let the battery drain all the way, as that might render it useless. So at this point I was letting it drain and checking the voltage every now and then. Here’s where I screwed up and left it on too long, and I thought it drained completely. (I assumed the voltage would continually get lower and lower, but I don’t think that happened.) Luckily, even with the battery completely drained, I was able to charge it and the camera recognized it, so I guess it worked!
Anyway, even though the Infolithium Batteries page has been around for years and years, I figured I’d add my 2 cents about the issue, since, you know… that’s what the Internet is for.
Enjoy your (like) new battery!
Behold… Time Lapse Bot!
No, this is not a wikibot… it’s the Time Lapse Bot, built out of old, recycled material, it is capable of doing time lapse captures using a sophisticated Apple iMac Computer, with an XLR8 InterView USB Video Capture Device connected to an old JVC Video Camera sitting on an old chair base which allows it to easily wheel around (within the length of the power cord.)
I actually spent $0 putting this all together, if you don’t count the fact that I paid about $499 for the video camera 10+ years ago, and $99 for the InterView back in 2005. Pretty much everything else was somehow attained for close to nothing. I could add wifi to this thing if I had a USB hub lying around, which might make it just little bit more neat-o, but hey, It’s a work in progress…
I’ve been testing it a bit this weekend, but the real test will come at BarCampMilwaukee4.
I spent way more time than I should have trying to figure out why my Canon ZR800 wasn’t being seen by my Mac. I tested the Firewire cable, I rebooted, I re-installed QuickTime. The Sony PD150 worked fine, but the Canon was a no-show.
Finally I dug up this Camcorder HQ post by Doug Van Doren
Actually, there’s one HUGE caveat with that: the new Canon ZR’s 800-850 will NOT work with a Mac that has another FireWire device plugged into it. If you have an external hard drive, your iPod or anything plugged into one of the other FireWire ports on the computer and then you plug in a Canon ZR800 series camcorder and launch iMovie or FCP or FCE, it will crash and freeze the Mac OS.
This is a huge bug I recently discovered when I bought a new Canon ZR-800 and ended up crashing all three of my Macs (I tried it on them all just to make sure).
It was a nightmare. Here’s the technical article from Apple:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61603
It does not mention the ZR800′s specifically, but trust me, it applies to them as well.
If there’s nothing else plugged into the other FireWire ports, it works fine. The only trouble with that is that most people like to use an external firewire drive to put their digitized footage on. This is a big problem if that’s what you’re trying to do.
Luckily I did not experience any real crashes, just the fact that iMovie and Final Cut sort of ‘stuck’ while the camera was turned on, and then resumed when turned off. The System Profiler also failed to show any Firewire device when the camera was on. Everything is fine when no other Firewire devices are connected, so there is a workaround… Still, it’s an annoying bug I hope can be fixed in the future.
