A little while ago, we discovered a cool new high definition video camera called the Hack HD. Think of it as the internal circuit board and camera lens of a 1080P GoPro camera, but unlike a GoPro, it’s designed to be hacked and tinkered with. It’s small and easy to embed into your own project. They even provide screw terminals for wiring it up. It’s also cheaper than a GoPro, which most people are leery of taking apart because of its price tag. The Hack HD records video to a micro SD card. It also sends VGA video through its Video Out wires. On our Actobot rover, we’ve wired the Video Out to a long distance transmitter  and a pair of FatShark Video Goggles so that we can drive around remotely via First Person View (FPV)(more on that in a later post).

hackhd2

We used our CNC Mill to machine a custom case for the Hack HD so that we could mount it on the Actobot’s pan/tilt turret.

HackHD Camera Case OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Actobot with HackHD 1

Actobot With HackHD 2

We should note that the Hack HD only has one lens (as shown in the photo at the top of this posting), but we wanted to experiment with giving the Actobot “eyes” so we built a false lens into the case.

With the completion of this case, our Actobot’s pan-tilt turret can now be quick-changed between three different video options : a WiFi camera, a GoPro, or a HackHD.