It's probably unsurprising that the engineers at ±«Óãtv R&D love gadgets, especially ones involving cameras - and who doesn't love cats? When the Cat Watch 2014 team approached us about improving on the 'Cat Cams' we made for last year's The Secret Life of The Cat, there was no shortage of volunteers willing to spend some of their down-time on the commonly overlooked technological challenge of building Cat Wearable Devices.
Dougal Shaw from ±«Óãtv News Online posted an excellent video today which gives
how to significantly increase the battery life of tiny HD808 spy cams, add night-vision capability, interface them to GPS trackers and adjust the form factor to work as under-the-chin collar cameras for pet cats. This time we decided to be more creative about the filming options we offered the production crew.
To remove the necessity for hand-wiring camera-GPS interfaces, Senior Engineer Ranulph Poole led the design of a circuit board which we could produce in bulk.Some of our Trainee R&D engineers (Tom Howe, Sam Bason, Peter Taylour) got to work integrating cameras into a variety of different cat toys, allowing the production team to potentially capture a preys-eye view of a cat attack. The theory was that the cats would interact with differently-sized cat toys in different ways.
Integrating a camera into the very smallest toys proved a fun challenge which was solved once we realised that we could have the camera lens attached to the main body of the camera by a flexible ribbon. This also enabled us to develop a 'head cam' - a small camera unit that sat behind the cat's head whilst the main body of the camera dangled under the collar. This could be used to film a view from between the cats ears. The wide angle lenses we were using let us capture the movement of the cat's ears themselves and this camera position resulted in surprisingly stable footage.While Alia Sheikh, Tom Nixon, Till Hackler, Karen Kingston-Lee, and Ranulph were feverishly assembling and testing the 'chin' and 'head' cameras, The instructions for building this system can be found on the . We even had a chance to and help deploy the cameras.
We've really been enjoying watching the programme, as well as all the the , and science . It's been exciting to see how our cameras have been used by the production team and we take our hats off to them for coping with the level of cat-herding it took to make .
and episodes and are currently available on iPlayer.