An article written about MyBiopod’s can now be found on inhabitat’s well respected Green Design web magazine/blog.
http://inhabitat.com/mybiopod-connects-nature-and-technology-to-create-miniature-worlds/
Many thanks to Hazel Saunderson for writing this article for me.
The MyBiopod containers completed and connected to the website through the laptop.
The MyBiopod website is close to completion and I just have a few more tweeks to finish it off.
The front page can be seen below:
Once the User is logged on they can connect their MyBiopod unit to the computer they can view all the sensor outputs as graphs and the camera footage is displayed as a time lapse on the records page, which can be seen below.
Both the camera and the sensor outputs can be viewed at 1 hour, 24 hours, 1 month, 6 months and 1 year intervals. The user can input their observations in the side bar which allows them to keep an observation log book/diary and share their observations with all other MyBiopod users on the front page.
User’s can view other peoples MyBiopod Units around the world through a map I have created and in future development this might be the way that users could select and view others MyBiopods all over the world.
I made the upgrade from my original cheap Tesco webcam which was fine for testing but failed to meet the final requirements as it was relatively poor quality and was only compatible with Windows.
The camera I choose to use was the Live cam socialize HD 720p webcam which has a wide angle lens, works on both mac and windows and shoots HD footage.
The intermediate software I used was Yaw cam which is free software that allows you to schedule how often your webcam takes photos. Yawcam can also be set to capture images when motion is detected within MyBiopod.Once Yawcam has captured the image it can either save it into a file which the MyBiopod website can access or stream straight into the visual monitor on the records page.
In order to film the inside of MyBiopod for my advert I had to create a mock MyBiopod whithout a front so that I could get the lens of the DSLR inside the container to film the sensors and inbuilt camera lens.
In order to suggest passage of time/long term use of my product I have chosen to use time-lapse photography in my video. Time-lapse photography helps capture the awe inspiring movement of environments which I have also incorporated into my biopods.
I have chosen to capture timelapse photography in a variety of locations to demonstrate the variety of environments that MyBiopod’s can support. The tree locations I choose were temperate forest, mountain top and slow moving river. I had previously chosen to take photos at the beach but that meant travelling to the coast where as all the other environments were in walking distance from my house. Through capturing the time lapse with the DSLR it not only means I get very high quality video but also perfect still images to pick from for my one great image.
I had hoped to incorporate the idea of users having MyBiopod’s all over the world into the end of my video through a nice animated graphic (MyBiopods appearing all over the globe then zooming out to display the MyBiopod logo) but due to the limited time I have left and the 1 minute restriction I have decided to leave it out.
I found that the best way to get a clean line of sealant on the inside of the containers was to put masking tape about 6mm from the edges (I used a piece of wood as a guide). Then once the sealant is applied and still wet you remove the masking tape which takes off any excess sealant.
The 3mm Acrylic perspex comes with double sided covers which help protect the containers from glue smears and scratches during construction.
