Weekend Project: Make a Portable Spy Scope

Use a cellphone camera for espionage that captures long-distance secret activities!

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Closed Caption:

when I wish I could get a picture of
that
oh hey its Kipkay back with another
weekend project for make magazine
in our continuing series of projects
from make vol.16 the spy tech issue
we're going to turn your ordinary cell
phone camera into a tool of espionage
that will allow you to capture those
long distance secret activities
nowadays most cell phones have built-in
cameras but the optics and the zoom on
them leaves a lot to be desired so we're
going to improve on that you're also
going to need a belt clip for your cell
phone that allows the cell phone camera
to be visible when the phone is open the
original project calls for a mana scope
or monocular but i could not find one
for the life of me so I'm using a small
pair of regular old binoculars and
you'll also need a metal conduit holder
the one I picked up was a one-inch ER
now you're gonna need something to hold
our portable spy scope and i'm using two
of these small gripped on bendable
portable tripods
now the first step is to attach the
conduit older to one of the tripods and
these conduit holders are pretty handy
because they have a hole right in the
bottom and all you need is one not to
attach it to the tripod the one inch
conduit holder I picked up was a little
large and the three-quarter inch one
that was at the store was too small for
my binoculars so i use some cloths
trapping and I wrapped it around the
eyepiece which gave it some thickness
then I attached the conduit holder to
the eyepiece and one half of our
portable spy scope is finished now it's
time to take the belt clip out to the
shop and secure device and we're going
to drill a hole that's a large enough to
fit the bolt for our second tripod mount
then secure the second tripod to our
belt clip using a nut
now it's time to open up the phone fire
up the camera and then it's just a
matter of carefully aligning the
binocular to the lens on the cell phone
the end result looks kind of freaky so
now it's time to see what kind of
pictures it takes
take a look at these before and after
shots of our portable spy scope it
actually works quite well and depending
on the binoculars you have and the
actual optics in your cell phone
you'll get varying results and that's
how to build a portable spy scope using
your cell phone camera now with any
device that captures video or pictures
be sure to use this responsibly and
we'll see you next time with another
weekend project