Housing

In one of the only strokes of luck on this project, I set out to procure the materials in oder to build the housing (which, I expected to create from wood) - and discovered while perusing the isles of B&Q that, on offer, were plastic toolboxes. These were cheap, malleable plastic boxes, with a grid on the lid!

This grid helped greatly in cutting the slot for the sketch cards, and, measured 44cm long. Almost double the minimum focus length, and was designed to seal, so no light entered!

With the housing taken care of, I began to place the webcam, and fit lighting. On my hunting, I had found useful push button LED lights, once procured by bandmates in our first dingy studio, and never used. Somehow, however, between moving from a dingy, damp studio to a not-at-all-damp studio the switches on these corroded, and so although I was left with fully functional LEDs, I couldn't power them on.

With a little bit of circuit bending, I found a way to jump the switch on the very simple circuit board, and, through harvesting christmas lights, was able to add a small switch to power the LED light.

I then "ball parked" the webcam, affixing with double-sided tape, and set up a rear blank card to act as a backing plate for the cards to be inserted.

At this point, I felt I could begin testing and experimenting with software more thoroughly, as I had the camera input guaranteed to be what would exist in the final device.