The battery that powers evil

After 4 hours of hard goggling, poking, mumbling,coffee drinking and more googleing I figured out what the problem was with the PS3 Eye camera. It was nothing wrong with the driver or with it being Windows 7. The issue was my laptop battery!

My issue was that as I started the PS3 Eye it ran for about 10-15 sec and then just went black as it was disconnected. Well I first suspected that it was cause I use Windows 7 and the driver suffer from Windows-envy. Dual booted my machine and exact same problem again. Looked around at Alex P's blog and found him using a tool called DPC Latency Checker. Ran it and it game me this pretty picture.



Something very wrong is going on here every 15 sec. It spikes and just as it does the camera fails. So I call in my research team (aka www.google.com) and found a forum where a guy/girl said that he/she removed the battery to get rid of the spikes that was caused of the power management system [can't remember where I found it :( so I can't give the credit]. Well. thought it was a long shot but I pulled the battery and tadaaaaaa. Problem solved. Spikes were gone and after testing all camera apps and they worked I found inner joy and floated away to nirvana, well had a coffee.

I will see if I can find a solution that don't involve pulling the battery but at least there is a workaround for now.

That's it for me tonight. Way past my bedtime.

Enjoy life!

First test with PS3 Eye...Fail

So I got my PS3 Eye yesterday. Happy as a spring chicken (I assume they are happy) I jammed it into my laptop and expected the miracles to begin. Well first off I installed a old version of Alex P's PS3 eye driver [v2.0b81109] on my Windows 7 machine. Result? Fail. It ran perfect in all resolutions and framerates but after a few seconds of running it just died.

I poked around some more and found a updated driver [v2.1.0.0130] hidden in Alex P's blog. Loaded it up.. Fail.. Same again. To be fair to Alex it hasn't been tested for Windows 7 so I will install Vista tonight and give it another run. Bit sad start but I know it will work. Just need to give it a helping hand (aka threaten to make it a surveillance camera for my girlfriends chilliplant!)

*Don't worry dear girlfriend. I haven't wasted the money. It will work  :D

Omniverse hardware prototype

My first hardware prototype is done. After lots of hard work and many many minutes (three to be precise) the first multi-touch prototype is done. It might not land me a job at Apple Hardware design department but I've gone for function over design aproach :) Here what you need to reproduce it.

• Cardbord box belonging to a bedlamp

• Old webcam you have lying around (I stole my girlfriends)


• Tracing paper (Atleast that what I think it's called. The paper you use to bake you know?)


• Tape


• Wettowl from local pizza place (optional)

Well I won't insult you by telling you how to put it all together but remember that this will only give you dark blobs so your software need to be able to trace that (CCV does that nicely)

My first test gave me very good results as I mentioned in the last post. When I get my Playstation Eye camera I will try to make a more permanent version for my glass table so I can get some better settings and calibration.

And if you wonder about the yellow wettowl. It's a pillow for the camera cause it cant bend it's neck as I wish. And I like to be nice to my gadgets ofc.

Until next time

Ordering in some hardware

After I've been doing some early testing with a crap camera and a cardboard box to get my first blob detection done. It work very good with CCV running at about 4ms detection time and 30 FPS.

But after some more research I found that the Playstation EYE camera is a very good cheap alternative for Multi-touch tables. The Playstation EYE gives me 60fps @ 640 x 480 and 120fps @ 320x240. So it's been ordered now and I hope to give it a test run this weekend.

I just hope that my poor laptop will be able to cope with such high resolution of uncompressed images. I can hear it shaking already. hehe