© Copyright 2005, Peacoque Labs

Background; HamsterTracker™ Side Project: 'Camera Fix'




I had some problems with this little gem

Camera Fix

I had a serious problem with my little gem. The small pieces of plastic which hold the battery in place, broke!

When I get my new hammy I want to shoot as much video as possible. So this fix was absolutely essential!

These two (circled in the picture) broke; and these are very essential for proper operation.

Because of this the lid would not shut. Therefore the battery couldn't supply its power. That ofcourse would ruin any photo or video.

Ok, I could have used sticky tape, but I didn't want to. Looks a bit like someone who fixed his glasses with bandaid (three years ago, and still walking around with it). I thought that if I opted for this kind of approach, I'd be a person filming with my camera fixed by such a bandaid. (Who would want that?).
See orange circles for what had broken.
So I started designing...
Then I started designing...
Figure 1: Original configuration.
Figure 2: Broken configuration, with the required correction.
Figure 3: Original configuration when the lid was shut; it never closed completely.
Figure 4: The modified configuration.


And improving...

Then I started designing...
Picture of safetycord fix. This improvement was needed because of the hard plastic which hold the camera safety cord together. This hard plastic would always bang agains t the aluminium casing of the camera, distorting audio.

I've used flytying foam here. This is used for tying artificial flies for flyfishing. Another great passion. I guess you can use that foam that's used to package electronics equipment (like dvd-player etc. ).
Check out the pages I made on flytying a few years ago.

This foam I glued (with glue sponsered by Dup) to this hard plastic. Trimmed it a bit with my very sharp pair of flytying scissors.

Et voila, a less audio obstuctive and obstrusive camera safety cord has been created!

Picture of my two cheap lenscaps I made.

Cheap camera lens shields:

A while ago when I was watching a show on tv about photography by the BBC, I got this great tip. Some guy had made some lens-cap-shields for use when filming or photographing. The black one is to block direct sunlight from shining straight into the lens. The White one is used when a bit more light is needed. I've used some Photo-Film cases here and a sharp knife, to cut a hole in the bottom that fits over the lens.
Picture of my camera with one of the two cheap lenscaps I made.


This picture was taken with my Logitech Webcam Zoom:

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ing. Mathijs A. van der Paauw