ProdMod ™

In the first article we took the simplest approach to mount the light to our camera. We passed a bolt through the entire body of the light and screwed it into the camera tripod mount.

We also showed how you can place the bolt inside the housing when you are not using it.

Well, what if you would like the bolt to stay in its place and act more like a built in knob then just some screw?

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NEW !! - A better set of instructions can be found here Complete Kit Instructions

Tests Battery Test| Photo Sample|Video Test
Upgrade Built-in screw stud|Fixed Voltage | 4LED
Vote for improvements!

Ever since digital cameras took decent video I stopped carrying around my DV video camera and instead use my point and shoot digital camera to take a few minutes of MOV or MPG video here and there. The only problem is my digicam is not equipped with a light to brighten up the videos I take indoors. So a while ago I searched for an LED light to use with my digital camera and I found one company camerabright.com that makes one that you screw into the tripod mount standard on all cameras. It costs about $30 to $40 bucks, has 4 white LEDs and takes 6 CR2032 coin cell batteries. I thought the price was ok, but there were some things I didn’t like about it and other people have also commented on.

So I decided to make my own and show you how.

First here is a comparison of the ProdMod DIY camera light vs. Camerabright.

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A while ago I had a vision of a small hand held device that would clamp onto a CD like a clamshell and spin it to 500 RPM just because I thought it would look cool. Then I thought maybe it should also play the music off the disc. And then I pictured converting CDs to MP3 on the fly and shooting them into a dumpster at high RPMs when done.

Since then I have only found a designer’s concept of a CD/MP3 player that has never been made (this cool black one)

and a simple manual CD cleaner (silver) you can buy for $12.95 at solutions.com but it doesn’t play music and it’s not even motorized:

The cool CD player up top was designed by Yong-Seong Kim. Designers like Kim can conjure up some really creative product ideas but it takes another skill set to bring it to life. The skillset of a maker, a gadgeteer, a prodmodder.

So why doesn’t someone with some prodmod skill try to make it happen?

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