Capture Video From the Past with This Raspberry Pi Camera Rig

As you go through life you’ll see many amazing things. Some happen slowly, allowing you to reach for your phone or camera to record the…

Jeremy Cook
5 years agoWearables

As you go through life, you’ll see many amazing things. Some happen slowly, allowing you to reach for your phone or camera to record the event. Others — like a meteorite in the sky or a fish jumping out of the water — occur in an instant, providing you with a fun memory, but no way to share it visually. Johan Link, however, has an innovative solution for this age-old problem with his “Film in the Past” device.

Link’s rig hooks onto a normal baseball cap, and films continuously with a USB camera. A Raspberry Pi 3B takes in the video, and upon pressing a button, it saves the last seven seconds of video that it captured. So if you “missed” that amazing event, you’ve got seven seconds to remember to press the record button, storing it for sharing and review.

Film in the Past features a number of 3D-printed parts for hardware mounting, and a 5000mAh battery to keep it going on your travels. You can even set up the Raspberry Pi as an access point via instructions found here, enabling you to view video instantly on your phone.

The device uses OpenCV for video processing, and Python code is available if you’d like to make your own setup. Of course, this leads to another problem for some, in that stories of a “huge” fish jumping may turn out to be a minnow, or the “five simultaneous meteorites” turn out to be an airplane’s light.

Jeremy Cook
Engineer, maker of random contraptions, love learning about tech. Write for various publications, including Hackster!
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