yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

DIY High Speed Video Camera - Muybridge Style - Smarter Every Day 5


3m read
·Nov 3, 2024

[Music] Hey, it's me, Destin. The idea, here at Smarter Every Day, is to make you smarter. I guess it was 1872, the governor of California tried to solve the age-old question: When a horse runs, are all four of its hooves off the ground at any point in transit? Now, artists of the day liked to show images with the horses' feet up front and in back off the ground. So he commissioned a guy named Eadweard Muybridge to create a series of images while the horse was running.

Now, Muybridge was pretty sharp, so what he did is he strung some strings out and had a man ride the horse through the series of strings, and each string was associated with a camera. Basically, it was a time-of-arrival switch. So, this was pretty interesting. Now this is a pulse generator, given to me by a company in Montana called Quantum Composers. It is amazing. It is a time machine without the flux capacitor, basically. Time for science.

What we're gonna do is we've got a piezoelectric transducer rigged up to this thing on the trigger input. All you have to do is just trigger the thing acoustically and it flashes. And this is programmable down to the 25 picosecond resolution. Here's a 1.8 second flash after... [snaps fingers] the sound. So, it's pretty awesome. Anyway... So what we're gonna do is to create a series of high-speed photography images and put them together in a video, just like Muybridge did back in the day. So, let's do it.

Weapons are not toys. What you're about to see was done by educated, experienced personnel in a controlled environment. Be smart. Let's load. Muybridge bullet, take one. Here we go. [Gunshot] [Pulse generator beeping] [Gunshot] [Pulse generator beeping] This is what the video looks like straight up, just as shot. And this is what the video looks like once I correct for the ballistic variance and go in there and, uh... put them in order, in distance. So, pretty cool.

Okay, so some of you are thinking, "that's awesome! No clue what it means." So let me explain. Commercial high-speed cameras are very expensive, but what we've done for repetitive events, we've created one at a fraction of the cost, and at 7 times the resolution of 1080p. So like Muybridge, we've combined simpler technologies to create something that was technologically out of our reach. It's pretty cool. I've got some improvements to this, keep an eye on me.

Alright, it is way too late to be playing with guns and time machines, so I gotta go to bed. Um, today we did art, science, math... a little bit of history; we played with guns and cameras. That's pretty awesome. So if you would, subscribe and tell all your friends, I'm sure they'd enjoy this stuff too. I'll put a link down in the info on the video, please click it. The least you could do is check the website out. If you're an engineer, it's really really cool stuff.

I got my dad a chicken for Father's Day. And I want to show you a pretty interesting method that chickens have to keep their heads stable. You know, in guidance and control, you have feedback loops, and so you have to know your position and where your relative motion is going so you can compensate for it, but chickens are really good at this, so... I'll show you. Watch his head stay totally stationary as I move his body... Captioning in different languages welcome. Please contact Destin if you can help.

More Articles

View All
How I Developed the Principled Way of Thinking
What happened is I found that I needed to write down my criteria and test them. So I started with the markets because, you know, it’s tough to wrestle all in your head with everything. I found that I needed to do that, and I could test the criteria. I fo…
A Scare in the Night | The Great Human Race
What do you think? You feel safe in here? I wouldn’t go through that nasty. My hands are full of these things. Not only was fire used for warmth and protection, but it was also a gathering place for humans and the beginning of a sense of community. You kn…
What if the Earth Was Flat?
The Earth isn’t flat. This is something we’ve known now for thousands of years. Aristotle proved it empirically by traveling to Egypt and witnessing new constellations of stars from the other side of the globe. After Eratosthenes used no more than a stick…
Startup Investor School Day 1 Live Stream
And the way the course is organized is there’s a lecture and then there’s a Q&A afterwards. So please hold your questions until the Q&A session at the end unless an instructor explicitly says they want questions during their talk. I will also take…
Panda School: (EXCLUSIVE) How the National Zoo Trains Its Panda Cub | National Geographic
I’m one of a very select group of people to get to interact with this animal, and I don’t take that for granted. It’s really cool for me to get to do something like that. Beibei is just absolutely a joy to work with. There is something about him; he’s so …
How to Fix the 'Finfluencer' Problem (feat. @ThePlainBagel)
I’m a billionaire. I can explain this in a way I might sound crazy. This is going to be the easiest money you can make in crypto: $2.7 million in one account. These cryptos are going to explode over the next 90 days. $14.1 million in another account, 102t…