So the last post was all about the mechanical chassis and frame and power systems; this time I want to look at the cameras and the computer.
The cameras we used were standard research ones we had in the lab at the time – fairly straightforward things, whose resolution would now be too low to be used on the most basic mobile phone (and which were strictly grayscale only), but which were fairly high end at the time:
They were small and light, which was a plus, but they needed special cables and power supply boxes, which was a bit of a pain:
Still, they let us get video reasonably cheaply. We did have another camera sensor, mounted on the very top, which Niall Winters was using for his PhD which was on Omnidirectional Video – it was one of the first panaspheric cameras, and again, mostly home-made:
