The Trippy Pan-Tilt-Zoom Webcam A project from 1997-2000

Contents

• History of the Trippy PTZ Webcam

• Photos of the Trippy PTZ

• The Trippy patent, U.S. Patent 6,027,257

• Control board external specification, V 1.10

• Control board programmer's manual, V 1.10

• BT protocol, Board V 1.00, Firmware V 0.17

• Trippy PTZ Embedded Code, the core idea

• tripdiag.c -- command-line tool to run diagnostic scripts

• diagV0.17 -- script for firmware V 0.17

• diagcanon -- script to configure zoom for a Cannon WL-61 camera

• diagsave -- script to save the Trippy state in EEPROM

• tripdemo.c -- command-line tool to exercise an initialized Trippy

WEB ACCESSIBILITY NOTICE To ensure accesibility, the University of Iowa will probably freeze this web site on April 22, 2027, and will probably delete it in 2028.

Notes

This material may be of interest to engineering students exploring how consulting relationships can work (or not work), and it may be of interest to those interested in how mechanical, electronic and software engineering all combine in the design of even rather mundane items that we find in the world around us.

Note on copyrights: The copyrights for some of the material here are in the hands of the corporate heirs of Basic Telepresence Incorporated. At some point around December 2000, the company entered receivership, and it was dissolved by November 2004, at which point remaining assets passed to the PTZ Liquidating trust and were immediately sold off. I have been unable to determine who ended up with the copyrights on the material here, so this material falls into the legal category of "orphan works."

I believe my use of this work is fair use because:

• This use does not enable any interesting commercial competition with whoever holds those copyrights. The material distributed here is not sufficient to allow reproduction of a working PTZ webcam, nor would an engineer starting out to build such a webcam be wise to begin with 20-year-old technology.
• This material is released as part of a critical commentary on the consulting relationship that led to the developmet of this material. Without the illustrative material, this commentary would be much less interesting.
• Basic Telepresence never paid for much of the material delivered in the second half of 2000.