Thread: Project NiteVision - NiteMax + HUD + carputer

oooo...now i just need to figure out a way to get $5 and i'm golden! thanks man!

Originally Posted by NiteMax Mark

The Sanyo chip on the NiteMax LCD Controller is made to accept S-Video. If the board itself carries these signals out to the world, you'll be able to feed it S-Video directly and you're done.

I will try to find the time to look at the details and post instructions on getting S-Video to work directly without any adapters!

That would be great!! It would increase the quality of the picture too! Not VGA but good enough! Once again thanks so much Mark!

spaceskater
I'll verify tomorrow or the next day, but pretty sure it's the lilliput and not the camera causing the white out. All those videos were shot only minutes before. I think when I plugged in the cam to the lilliput it glitched it. Easy enough to verify.

The other thing I need to do is put the cam on regulated voltage.
For the in car testing, I'm just running it to the ACC socket. I know with some of the cheaper cmos cameras, the picture brightness varies somewhat with voltage. Maybe the same here?

For the polarizing film, did you use it as the display or just lay it over the lilliput? The privacy film I use is sort of like a polarizer, but with a somewhat wide angle. When I layed it over the lcd itself, the double reflection was just about gone.

Did some night driving and it's raining like crazy. Even if the light can be compensated, polarizing I don't think will be a bad idea. You can see that wet ground reflects a lot and hides detail (lane markings for one).

I encoded these at a lower rate. The pause is gone, but obviously, the quality isn't as good. In particular, when it's dark. No IR illumination in any of these.


Front Camera vid-1 9271 KB


Front Camera vid-2 3968 KB


This one's a little interesting. One, it shows how the camera distorts. That's a somewhat tight spot, but you'd never know it.

The other is the flickering light, denoted by the arrow. If you watch the vid, there's this light just flickering (not to the eye of course, just the camera). I think when I pull out, it's at least somewhat my headlights, but before when I'm not moving... dunno.

Not sure of the cause, but as the car pulls up to it, it becomes a massive glow.

Front Camera vid-3 5708 KB

Headlights off briefly, fairly dark road

Front Camera vid-4 2737 KB

Originally Posted by shotgunefx

I also get the lag, thought it was my machine

It's funny, I tried upgrading today after doing these, then every video encoded after that was frigging upside down so I had to uninstall it and go back to the previous version.

I'll have to try screwing some more with the dsp features, though they didn't seem to do much last time around to improve the situation.

As far as the compensating, there's got to be something else to it. With different lenses, it does a much better job of compensating. I can aim it at a bright light and see the element. Maybe it's a combination of the low F and the wide lens. The other ones I've tried that fare better are more narrow to various degrees.

For instance, one that adjusts from F-1.5 to 16 fairs slightly better than the wide angle F1.6 even at F-1.5. At about 2,it's close to perfect.

In all the experiments in the house, I never had that washed out effect ever. Even aiming a red laser at it, some of the surrounding scene could be seen with good composition (unless you hit it dead center and then the whole thing was white/red), maybe it was a voltage problem for the camera or the lilliput. In the first videos, the camera was hooked up to the camcorder at all times. The last, to the screen. Though I was driving around with just the screen at first with no problems.

its all very well trying to compensate for it but the camera will then in turn use its internal processes to put the metering back to its defined average, you wouldn't gain anything by putting a filter in front of the lens or making the lens smaller, you'd only make the camera less sensitive and so more noisy. It'd still get washed out. It is metering for an AVERAGE of the scene, and that includes the BRIGHT outdoors and the DULL indoors so it is outputting an image that is metered for somewhere in between when in actual fact you want an image metered for the bright bits only as you're not concerned with seeing your dash on camera

Originally Posted by TomG

its all very well trying to compensate for it but the camera will then in turn use its internal processes to put the metering back to its defined average, you wouldn't gain anything by putting a filter in front of the lens or making the lens smaller, you'd only make the camera less sensitive and so more noisy. It'd still get washed out. It is metering for an AVERAGE of the scene, and that includes the BRIGHT outdoors and the DULL indoors so it is outputting an image that is metered for somewhere in between when in actual fact you want an image metered for the bright bits only as you're not concerned with seeing your dash on camera

See, I don't know if that's the case with the DSP.

For instance, the video where it's snowed out? I put a pair of sunglasses in front of the lense, which made the car visible, but had little if any effect on the rest of the scence.

If I didn't erase it, I'll grap a screen cap.

i wonder if it might be worth it to build an actual roof mount projecto like this thing http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/NEW-D...60187428QQrdZ1

Originally Posted by Peoples

i wonder if it might be worth it to build an actual roof mount projecto like this thing http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/NEW-D...60187428QQrdZ1

For one, in my car, I'd crack my skull off it for sure in an accident. It's pretty big.

I mean, basically, it's just a projector and a combiner. If you were going to lay out that kind of money, I'd just get one of these Mitsubishi Pocket Projectorswhen they are finally available

updated, they now are, about fuggin time and not quite the $699 price they were promising.

A few hundred more, but also could use it as a projection monitor.

the DLP you linked to won't be very good in car as the screen size it projects is, dare I say it, too big!

Looking inside that proper HUD device, it don't half look simple. The res of the screen is the same as that in the nitemax, we could make one of those easily enough.

12V halogen bulb --> LCD --> lens --> screen

thats pretty much all you'd need I reckon.