Indestructible Philips Webcam How much maltreatment can a webcam take? or, close up photos with a cheap webcam... You can see the Indestructible Philips Webcam in action here if the wind is in the right direction... I've had this Philips 740 webcam for years, and well, to be honest, it has probably seen more than any webcam should (in more ways than one..) but it's still going strong. I'm beginning to think it has magical indestructible powers. It was first taken apart to play with its IR properties after reading this article. Okay, lots of fun looking straight through a scotch and coke, and seeing remote control signals, etc. There is a good article on using these philips cams for nightvision here. Then it was forgotten about until I put the TINI LCD online and people started asking, 'Where is the webcam so I can see my message?' Well, I dug out the 740, but I'd lost the original IR filter, and could not get a decent picture of the LCD with the original lens, despite a night investigating the filtering properties of various permanent markers, some of which, despite their filtering properties being fairly uninteresting, had managed to dissolve the original plastic lens and make everything go a bit blurry, to say the least. Now, I had a Pentax CCTV lens floating about in the bits box, so I thought I'd try to hook it up to the 740, so after a bit of a vicious attack on the case with a dremel, and some burnt fingers constructing a threaded insert from some polymorph plastic (crudely using the actual lens to tap the thread, I might add...) And... I've made a toilet seat for Morph - Yippee! But.. Ahaa, I've also managed to mount a new and much better lens on the 740. Woo. This one has an adjustable iris, and some focus adjustment. I got the focus roughly right by grinding down the CCD board mounts and using small springs around the screws used to hold the board in place to allow adjustment of the distance beteween the CCD and the lens until I got a clearish picture, both close up and at a distance using the focus adjustment on the Pentax lens. I'd hoped this would be all that was needed to hold the CCD board in place, but it was only held with two screws, so tended to wobble about a lot sending the focus out, so once the best position was found with the spring and screw arrangement, I hot-glued the bugger on the other corners. Gotta love that stuff... This made a good arrangement for taking close up photos with a cheap webcam, but the backlight on the LCD was still drowning out the contrast, so the text was illegible, nomatter how I set the iris. A lighting source was needed. Now, the 740 had a SMD red LED that lights when the camera is active. How about replacing this with a fairly bright white LED? To see if it would make a difference, I knocked together a throwie with a white LED I had in the box and dropped it infront of the camera, and, yep it improved the contrast no end. So, the red SMD LED on the cam board was replaced with a white LED, and then the poor thing was reassembled for the umpteenth time... More hot glue, and all was looking good. Now, for a base to hold the beast, the original plastic tripod having been snapped and lost long ago. The top cover of an old HDD had a screw hole in just about the right place and had enough weight to hold the thing down with its new lens, so I give you, dear reader, live on the internet, The Indestructible Philips Webcam... Do bear in mind that a most of this abuse was achieved with the bare webcam board plugged into a Linux box running the superb w3cam and no anti-static strap at all. Please, think of the webcams, and give generously. I'm really surprised it still works at all..