This isn't exactly about something broken, but I guess if you did it wrong it would be? X3 Imma pretty much just paste what I had in my LJ:
After reading
this, I decided it sounded easy enough to give it a shot myself. Basically it involves replacing the lense in your webcam with film negative, to give you an infrared webcam.
I have some IBM webcam which I never use for anything, so it wasn't a huge deal if I messed it up. I dug it out of hiding and opened it all up, finding that the lense screwed out fairly easily, and that it was constructed better than the one the guy in the article had, requiring me to use no sort of wire or anything to try and hold the film down, since it already had a plastic piece and a clear lense just for that.
After putting it back together and hooking it up, sure enough, it seemed to work. I was picking up infrared light like a pro. Here's a few of the things I thought were snapshot worthy:
As can be expected, one can see the light coming from a remote control rawther well.
Somewhat more interesting however is that this light seems to act just like an infrared flashlight. I was lighting up parts of my room just by pointing a remote at it.
This here is a drivers license. Obviously they use special ink, making it appear blank, aside from the light-colored logos, which only appear as faint circles on there.
There's some craziness going on with the monies, as can be seen by those gaps. They're perfectly fine when looking at them with the naked eye. I'm thinking this is what change and drink machines use to determine what type of bill it is, based on the gaps in the ink when viewed in IR.
Lastly, as an example of how you can see through certain types of material, this is my center channel speaker. It's as if the cloth mesh over the top of it isn't even there, since you can't normally see that speaker hole by looking at it.
That's all the truly interesting things I've discovered so far, aside from things the guy showed in the original article.
