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Sproutcam Apparatus Page

The Apparatus and It's Evolution

The pictures below clearly show the two lots of apparatus we used.

2000/12/14-13:00 Given that part of the purpose of this project was to produce some stop motion video, it rapidly became clear that the first setup was not really suitable.

Sprouts are grown by washing them with water to provide the prime part they need that can not be provided by the sustenance stored in the seed. The major problem was that this water drained into a supporting dish below the sprout tray and the sprout tray had to be moved everytime the water tray was emptied. So that the sprout tray was never returned to the same position for the images captured for the stop motion video, which made it very difficult to watch.

The second setup has solved this major problem as the sprout tray now rest high enough to have a collecting cup beneath it which drains into a floor level plastic bottle.

The next problem to be solved is the effect of the incandescent light which is being used to provide sufficent light for the industrial camera. Given that the light is only 500mm (setup 2) from the sprout tray, it has the effect of drying out and wilting the shoots tips. The solution to be trialed latter will be infra red leds.

The usual notes apply. This page contains a series of reduced images for preview of each step. Click on the link beside each picture if you would like to download the full size image. A broken image means that the image isn't there yet - I've just pre-prepared some links.

The camera is an old industrial camera setup and is not the best. It requires some very bright lighting and is either getting worn our or not properly adjusted. The green plug you can see is actually red. Anyway, the camera is being asked to capture a 640x320 colour image and these are the full images you see when you click on the link. The preview images have been sized reduced by XV on Linux. If you want to know how I set the camera up, this link tells it all. I'm using webcam from the Xawtv package for the capturing for the Sproutcam web page. A cron script just copies the current image aside once an hour for the time lapse that I'm currently looking at making.

Apparatus One

	Left hand view 1	Left hand view 2	Left hand view 3
	This view is from the left hand side. The sprout tray and drainage trays are clearly seen in the bottom middle. The camera and supporting tripod occupy the upper left frame and the white support arm on the right holds the incandescent light, which is just above the frame, but the glare can easily be seen. Also in the upper right is the window that WOA Yard Cam looks out of.
	Centre view 1		Centre view 2
	The little black box to the left of the sprout tray is actually the camera control box, which allows a little bit of adjust to the camera. The mass of cables running through the scene are all for cameras, and the TV aerial. The camera taking these pictures is a little "sugarcube" that is actually connected to two of those calbles. Another two are for the industrial camera actually recording the sprouts and another two handle the Yard Cam camera.
	Elevated view 1		Elevated view 2

Apparatus Two

	Left hand view 1	Left hand view 2	Left hand view 3
	The left hand views give a good general view of the north east corner of the WOA office as well as the overall layout of the apparatus. It is also liberally coated with Linux propaganda {:-).
	8 o'clock	7 o'clock	6 o'clock
	These views gradually swing towards the centre position.
	Drain to water collector.		Overhead view