Modern webcams have a lens wich recieves light and builds up images based on that light. For normal consumer use webcams are supposed to give a image of what the world actualy looks like to the human eye. However, immagine if you could actualy infrared trough your webcam, it isnt that hard actualy :-)
First of all make sure you have a working webcam, these shouldnt be to hard to get these days. Most standard webcams on the market will suffice for our experiment, The one I used is a
Logitech Quickcam Messenger
However as stated before any modern webcam would probably work.
Here you can see my webcam before I started to actually started to hack it. Behold it in all its innocence, completaly oblivious to the horrors it is about to endure :-)
The next step is to open up your webcam and to gut it. This shouldnt be to hard, Usualy it has a few screws in there to hold it together, simply remove the plastic footstand (wich most modern webcams come with anyways today) and unscrew the screws. Then simply pull it apart and behold the inner workings of a webcam.
The inner sanctum
In the case of the cam I used there is some wiring inside to a button and a microphone on top of the cam (the button is used for taking snapshots) It was not hard to remove these as they are basicly just plugged into the board wich holds the lens and can easily be put back into the proper place when putting the cam back together again. Thank you Logitech!
The cables that connect the microphone and button to the rest of the cam can be seen quite clearly here
The cables can be easily removed and insterted into the sockets again at the rebuilding stadium
Now we actualy are getting to the interestind part about those whole guide, the actual hacking of the cam. In front of the actual lens there is a outter rim connected to it wich is used to adjust the sharpness of the image (the ring you have to turn on the cam itself to focus or defocus it) This rim can easily be taken of just take of the ring and youll be left with much smaller piece wich holds the lens.
The lens is just screwed into the place that holds it basicly. So we can just start turning it untill it comes apart from the base. After that you will have a full view of the chip that registers the light and builds the image we then see appearing on our screens. Be verry carefull tough not to get any dust or hair or anything else on to that chip. As it is an excelent way to ruin any mod-ers day :-)
The chip wich reads the light falling onto it and turning it into a image.
Another view of the chip
Now that we have the lens apart from the actual camera its time to take a closer look at the lens itself:
Note that we can now clearly reach the focusing glasses in the lens, be carefull not to touch them with your fingers
The really hard part starts out here, the trick is to get the little glass at the backside of the lens out if it. The method I used was to heat a needle up till it was glowing red and just cutting the plastic in such a way that I created a cut into over the whole side of the lens so that I could prey it a wee little bit apart and it would give me room so I could start to pick out the lens with a needle as well. Im sure there are beter ways to do this, but it turned out that my way worked well enough to get the lens out of the holder and keep it completaly intact without any scratching at all.
Even tough it seems pretty messed up the lens is actualy not harmed in any way.
Next after getting the glas lens part out of there you will have a clear view of the Infrared filter wich looks like a thin piece of glass with a reddish glow to it. Now I admit that my pictures of the actual infrared filter were totaly messed up. But luckily a friend of mine who also did the same mod shot this excelent (tough somewhat too spectacular :P) pic of the filter
All credits for this pics go out to |Metiz|, Thanx mate!
After removing the Infrared filter you will be left where a small space where the filter used to be, our goal is to create a complete Infrared cam wich will only show things in infrared. So for this purpose we need to block out all visible light from entering the cam.
Here we see the place where the IR filter used to be
After studying this concept for a while I found that the best way to block "normal spectrum light" from entering the cam was to use a piece of negative photo wich consisted of absolute blackness. (Thus creating a effective filter blocking the visible spectrum from being picked up by the cam)
I actualy got this piece of negative film from a local photo store. I was told that they end up with these things as result of failed sets of pictures and they are usualy thrown away. So it wasnt a problem to get a piece of failed negative film from them at all.
Make sure its ABSOLUTE BLACK tough. I tried doing this with a piece of "black" from a normal negative photograph and it just didnt cut it. It let trough alot of the normal spectrum and as a result I had a Infrared/Normal cam wich was fun to experiment with. But our goal is to create a perfect Infrared cam as this will give MUCH beter quality in pictures (Immagine looking TROUGH a glass of Cola as if its water hehe)
Just cut up the negative film into the shape of the chamber where the IR-Filter used to be and place it in there, luckily in the webcam I used there wasnt any holding mechanism of any sort So I could just cut a round piece of negative film roughly the size of the IR filter chamber and fit it in.
After all these procedures it is time to finaly put together the cam again! A thing that I ran into was when I reconstructed the whole cam, the vision was verry blurry indeed, and after nearly giving up on my webcam I screwed the lens onto the cam board even harder till it really couldnt go any further; That was when I got a crystal clear image, so dont just give up and keep adjusting your camera, youll get it right sooner or later. The main thing is to remember not to get the lens dirty or scratched.
The cam halfway into the reconstruction process...Notice the burn marks where I made a slice into the side of the lens holder, even tough it looks messed up it works perfectly, and does not show in any op the images
Now for some Pictures I took in Infrared...
Here is a picture of a bottle of Cola in Infrared. As you can see its quite transperant in Infrared
Here I am pouring in a glass of Cola, as you can see beter now its almost as transparent as water.
A bottle of wine looks even more water like, note that is RED wine
This picture of my eye is taken in total darkness (this the widened pupil) Even tough it makes me look like a raving drugged dope fiend, it does illustrate the point of photography in utter darkness
I personaly really enjoy this picture, this is my monitor when it is ON! Becouse of the blocking of visible light it doesnt show any light at all, also found out this way a monitor does not produce any Infrared radiation.
That about sums up my project, P.s. In some of the pics in infrared I used a Infrared led-lamp to provide me with with illumination; Note that this led is NOT visible to human eyes. For those interested, I made it using a infrared led wich I got from a old remote control, and installed that into a housing wich is supposed to hold a lamp for a trophy-case. Picture illustrated below.
Thanks for having interest in my project, for any questions or comment please mail me at: (And I know im going to regret putting this here :P) [email protected]