Activity LED using the original iSight LED

[muffinresearch]

Thanks for the excellent project. After getting a build working I've been playing around with adding an LED to show when the camera is active.

Showmewebcam handily switches GPIO 21 to HIGH when the camera is in-use so it's possible to put an LED in the place of the one that would have been on the original iSight.

All that's required is a 330ohm resistor and an LED. As seen in this test run:

I pulled out the original LED from the iSight and carefully soldered two cables either side of the surface mount LED. I used some shrinkwrap to shield the connections from the case and used shrinkwrap with a hole punched in it to aim to get the light only going up into the small clear plastic diffuser. A small amount of rearwards leakage was fixed with some Aluminum tape on the body.

Here's the end result:

[maxbbraun]

Very cool!

[grantland]

@muffinresearch Super cool! Does the original LED need a 330ohm resistor too or was it just plug and play?

[muffinresearch]

@muffinresearch Super cool! Does the original LED need a 330ohm resistor too or was it just plug and play?

Yep, I added the same size resistor with the original led too.