Is it possible to programmatically turn on the iSight camera?

I want to set up automatic camera capture on my mac, I am using isightcapture program.

However, I need to turn on the camera, do you know how I should do this ? I have very limited skills in Objective-C and RubyCocoa is not working in my environment (ruby 1.9 installed).

I'm not entirely sure what you're aiming to do with your automatic camera captures, but EyeSight might be worth a look in to. It will allow you to take captures at predefined intervals in a range of formats, and will even produce a log of the images taken (which could be useful in your scripts?).