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 I posted a moblog photo on Thursday showing a CVS camera, an old Palm serial cable, and a USB cable. Today I combined them all in one magnificent project.
CVS sells one time use cameras for $30. You buy the camera, take 20 minutes of movie, and then return it to the store to be "developed." They give you back a DVD. The video isn't that great (384x288 resolution with a bitrate around 500kbps in Xvid format.) If you've bought a digital still camera in the past couple years, it probably does 640x480. The advantage of this one is that it's cheap. If you break it, you don't feel bad.
So I decided to follow the footsteps of many before me and hack this thing so I can get the movies off myself. I'm not going to post the full instructions here since some of the steps are a bit shady, but all the info is out there on the web. The search just makes it more worthwhile when you succeed. Here are some links to get you started:
The tough part is that there have been a bunch of different versions of the camera as they try to stop the modding community. The one I had is M230 (the most recent.) For the 230 series, you need one more piece of software that I can't link to. It's used to unlock the camera (crack the response key that you need.) Check those forums and you'll figure out how to get it. It wouldn't be any fun if you had ALL the answers, right? Once I had all the equipment, it took me about 3 hours to complete (including forum reading and internet searching.)
I'm not sure what I'll end up using this for, but it will probably get strapped to my motorcycle and/or ski helmet at some point.
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