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About a month ago, we posted a project from the MIT Camera Culture group called the Bokode. SparkFun has recently created our very own Bokode that displays a tiny SparkFun flame and even smaller 2D barcodes. The images you see in the video are exactly what our camera sees at varying distances.
In this shot, our camera is only few feet away from our Bokode cube and we were able to resolve a dozen or so barcodes. Each pixel in the barcode is 5 microns wide!
Here is our Bokode cube. It contains the transparency film, a lens, and a red LED to illuminate the film. All we have to do is power the LED!
The projected images were printed on a plastic transparency and then mounted at a focal distance away from a lens inside of our plastic Bokode cube.
I actually created my own version of this. I've become very interested in the Bokode concept and spreading it around.
http://sinbox.org/bokode
Wouldn't it also be possible to use black & white film to produce the bakode pattern? As I see it, you would just have to print (a negative version of) the pattern on a regular printer and then take a picture of it with a good old film based camera to shrink it down to the cameras 24x35mm frame.
Rollei's Ortho 25 film has a resolution of up to 330 lines per mm (= 8382 lines per inch = 16764 dpi) that should suffice (if Andrews calculation is correct).
I wonder if a lazer printer could make useable barcoads for a autonomous robot that would use the barcode flashlight & camera to sence objects in its way.
Id like to put in another peg for a Bokode tutorial (or bringing that box to market perhaps?).
We're working on the tutorial, information, and products. Currently, we just wanted to replicate the process to see it work on our own (and with MIT's blessing). We hope to productize it as much as possible, but the current parts are still pretty pricey. Wer werking on it.
Great work, folks. I wrote about Bokode (http://sunnyeves.blogspot.com/2009/07/bokode-barcode-killer-and-much-more.html) right after the SIGGRAPH 09 in July. I never thought it would reach industrial maturity at this fast rate.
@Sam Pratt
I have linked the original paper on Bokode here: http://sunnyeves.blogspot.com/2009/07/bokode-barcode-killer-and-much-more.html. See if it helps. It is a very new technology. So the researchers might not have had time to put up a tutorial.
@Sundar Srinivasan,
Thanks for the article. It's great.
At my workplace we have a platesetter capable of creating 10?m dots at 2400dpi (1/2400in = 10.6?m). We don't use ours at the resolution but two of our sister companies do on a daily basis.
Our filmsetter also operates at 2400dpi but I think it tops out at 85?m (about 300lpi) as it cannot resolve its spot-size to the fine degree that the platesetter is capable of.
I'm also curious about how you guys did this- I'd love to see a tutorial.
@Joshua- that would be 5080 DPI, by my calculations. Normal laser printers are 1200 DPI. Perhaps they have a 5000 DPI printer for making PCB negative films?
http://www.pageworks.com/
My apologies for the rather simple question. What printer did you use to print with 5um pixels? What's that in DPI, 50800?
Bokode tutorial? Please? I really would like to try to make one of these. Is there a specific method? Could you guys tell us how you did it? You Know, you could always fly me out there and tell me how you did it. That would be better than a tutorial. Haha but really a tutorial would be nice. Thanks.
Sure, there is a whole paper all about it. http://web.media.mit.edu/%7Eankit/bokode/bokode_sig09.pdf