$100 Document Camera

Written on 12:07 PM by Ur English Teacher

We call ours eyeCamD; you can call yours BETTER and CHEAPER! Stop paying $400, $500 or more for document cameras right now. Using a few supplies from your local hardware store, you can use a high quality webcam as a document camera with TONS more functionality.

-Logitech 9000 webcam (8 mega pixels, the Avervision CP150 is 3.2 mega pixels)
-PVC pipe (we used 1/2")
-PVC elbow
-3 layers of 1/2" MDF (Medium Density Fiberboard-kind of like particleboard but heavier) glued together to form a heavy base
-You can use velcro to affix the camera to the camera arm if needed or you can cut a slot for the bottom "leg" of the camera to go through.
-If you're into appearances, you can use black plastic paint to paint the PVC parts.
-If you're going to paint the base, coat it with a glue/water mixture first to seal the MDF or else you will use a whole can of paint on one base. No kidding. We did it.

In our district, shop students are making bases for our campuses. It's a great lesson for them and we're getting a really superior document camera as well as saving $16,500 for EACH of three new campuses that would have had Avervision document cameras!

To see more, visit http://eyecamd.blogspot.com

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7 Comments

  1. Anonymous | May 28, 2009 at 6:49 AM

    Do you churn your own butter too?

     
  2. Karen Janowski | May 28, 2009 at 11:06 AM

    This is an awesome idea and I immediately ordered the webcam from Amazon. I'm going to modify it a bit and use velcro to fasten it to an old halogen lamp I have that allows flexibility. Can't wait to try it out!
    Thank you so much for the suggestion. This will be portable and easy to use.

     
  3. Anonymous | May 29, 2009 at 2:07 AM

    Good Idea, but Document Camera can operate without PC and connect directly to the Projector. There are more features and functions are missing which techers use, also frame rate and video quality is not as good with the logictech webcam. Remember, this is webcam, it is for streaming, so compress is high which will lose video quality. Better yet, if you think using a PC based webcam is a better solution, try to mount a Sony HD camcorder and use component output directly to the projector (DLP), the video will amaze ya.

     
  4. Anonymous | May 29, 2009 at 2:11 AM

    Logitech webcam is only 2 MP, I don't think I see a 8MP webcam, can you let me know?

     
  5. Ur English Teacher | May 29, 2009 at 6:42 AM

    I think churning butter sounds like it'd be mighty fun to try! Thanks for the suggestion.

    The Logitech 9000 webcam linked in the post is 8 MP, but you're right, most webcams are only 1 or 3, so you have to be careful about that.

     
  6. Anonymous | August 25, 2009 at 3:28 PM

    I don't know how well the patent is going but Dukane is already selling something similar.

    http://thejournal.com/articles/2009/04/16/imagepro-cam9000-combines-document-camera-with-webcam.aspx

     
  7. Ur English Teacher | August 25, 2009 at 4:26 PM

    That is COOL! I don't know about $200 though. Ours is about $76. We are no longer thinking about patent type stuff. We're educators, and we can't stand to keep a good idea to ourselves. Thanks for sharing the link. That will save lots of people lots of $.

     

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