Electronic Products for Creative Minds
Today on the Make Magazine blog was a posting for a “Weekend Project: USB Motion Detector (PDF)”. This is the project from Ken Delahoussaye from the article in Make: Volume 16. You can download the PDF of this article from here (PDF file).
But also “KipKay” created a video posted in the blog that you can watch on YouTube here (YouTube).
Have fun watching!
(Well, not “anyone”. Just cool people.)
Today on the Make blog was a posting (it was from the Make forum) by “pmgeahan”. It talks about the U401 use in Make#16:
Thought others might be interested in this; I built the USB motion detector in MAKE 16. The driver program provided was for Windows and was used to make a presentation work.
In my case, I’m a Linux guy, so I hacked together an executable to drive the detector. Strictly speaking, at least on Ubuntu, there’s already a HID driver for the USBMicro interface, but it doesn’t do anything. This program triggers on the motion and, in this case, takes a photo with your webcam. A security system, if you will.
Anyhow, the program is pretty simple, all told. Couple of caveats: First, this has been tested on an Ubuntu box running 2.6.27-11 only. You need libusb to make this thing work. Also, you need privileges on the USB device. I wasn’t able to find exactly how to make this work on my box (couldn’t figure out which /dev entry to make readable/writable). I chose to run it suid root. I know, not the greatest idea, but it works. If you can figure out what to do, lemme know.
The source code can be downloaded here
I will be exploring more Linux programming.